by W. Eric Martin

Most of the comments I've read about the 2023 train game Arabella ask why a kitten is on the cover when the gameplay focuses on track-building and share-holding. The publisher explains that the kitten is intended to represent how easy the game is to learn, but any cat lover who picks up this title is in for a surprise since the gameplay does not involve kaiju cats demolishing railroads.


Let me instead recommend that fans of felines check out one of the games listed below instead, each of which features cats in their gameplay, starting with Kyoto no Neko, a 2-4 player design from Cédric Millet that French publisher Matagot will release at SPIEL Essen 24:

In Kyoto no Neko, 2 to 4 players are kittens who explore the modern-day city of Kyoto, Japan through a series of independent, replayable scenarios. In each scenario, players must fulfill a variety of missions, from befriending a school boy to fighting an aggressive stray cat, or stealing the food from other player's dinner bowl. Throughout the game, each player will evolve, developing their skills and gaining the ability to explore new parts of the map by climbing on bushes and rooftops.

Using a system of skills, Kyoto no Neko will see each player interact with some of Kyoto's inhabitants, both animal and human. Each turn provides the opportunity to uncover something new about the city as players will reveal elements from little insects to specific objects or denizens of Kyoto. While some of these elements are represented by cardboard tiles, others come as standees, ensuring a stunning visual presence.

In a press release announcing the game, Millet writes, "I wanted to give everyone the chance to embody a kitten in a condensed experience of exploration and skill development, based on a role-playing mechanic in which every dice roll has a positive outcome. (You succeed or you learn!) The game lets you experience the sensations of a kitten's life by performing the full variety of typically feline activities (at least a new one in each scenario); I hope it will delight cat fans of all ages!" Now that sounds like a full feline experience!

• Speaking of "neko", in August 2024 the balancing game Nekojima from David Carmona, Karen Nguyen, and Unfriendly Games will become available in the U.S. courtesy of distributor Hachette Boardgames. An overview of this 1-5 player game:

In Nekojima, "The Island of Cats" in Japan, an electricity network is developing to supply the various lively districts of the island. The installation of electric poles becomes more complex due to the narrowness of the territory and its curious population of cats strolling on the cables.

Nekojima is a wooden game of skill and dexterity in which you have to keep an entire installation in balance. Players take turns placing or stacking denchuu — 電柱, or electrical poles — respecting the locations without any hanging cables touching. Be careful not to be the one to bring down the structure. This game requires reflection, concentration and skill.

David Carmona schools me in a demo at SPIEL Essen 23
—In competition, the player who knocks down the structure loses.
—In co-operation, the goal is to go as far as possible.

• Designer Tobias Hall is crowdfunding the tile-laying game Cat Packs through the end of April 2024, with the goal of debuting the game at SPIEL Essen 24 from his own All Or None Games:

Cat Packs is a fast-paced card game in which you'll cleverly put together the cat gang of your most whimsical dreams! The game includes over one hundred unique illustrated cats by artist Liselotte Eriksson.

On each turn, players draft a new cat from the alley and use resources to play out cards from their hand to add to their cat pack. All cats have different requirements and benefits, but not all cats fit well together, so players must carefully consider their positions. The goal of the game is to earn the most "catshine", which players receive by collecting sets of five cat types, surrounding certain cards with other cards, matching corners of four cards together in a catshine symbol, or winning the power struggle taking place after each round!

Who doesn't want to give a good home to a rough-and-tumble meowboy who needs a blanket to snuggle under?

• Do robotic cats count for this post? Let's say yes so that I can include Cyber Pet Quest, a design by Brendan Kendrick and Bernie Lin of Dead Alive Games that they are crowdfunding in April 2024, with plans for early sales at Gen Con 2024 in August. Here's an overview:

Embark on a thrilling adventure with Jane, a fully bionic cat, and her cybernetically enhanced friends: Clay the dog, Freya the raccoon, and Roman the goose. Join this eclectic team as they set out to find Jane's missing owner, Howard, in the intra-apocalyptic city of San Lazaro. With its diverse and immersive locations and a quirky cast of enemies, this metropolis will keep you on the edge of your seat. As you delve deeper into the city, you'll need to flex your tactical muscles and harness the pets' array of unique abilities and powerful items to succeed in your quest. Will you uncover the truth behind Howard's disappearance and guide Jane to her missing owner? Your choices will determine the outcome.

Designed for 1-4 players, Cyber Pet Quest is played as a multi-chapter campaign. Taking the roles of the four pets, players investigate and interact with the environment, complete chapter objectives, gain power items and charms, and outsmart the enemies who are trying to stop them. The campaign has twelve chapters in a branching format so that players can play the full game multiple times to see the different branching stories.

• Should you care more for big cats, along with many more animals of a non-cat nature, turn your eyes to, um, Nature, a Dominic Crapuchettes design that publisher NorthStar Game Studio plans to release in August 2025 following a 2024 Kickstarter campaign.


Nature is an evolution of Evolution, which the then-named North Star Games released in 2014, with that game being a Crapuchettes co-design with Dmitry Knorre and Sergey Machin, who were responsible for the 2010 title Evolution: The Origin of Species. Over the years, North Star evolved Evolution into the standalone games Evolution: Climate, Evolution: The Beginning, and Oceans, and now it's being transformed once again.

The gameplay of Nature resembles that of earlier games, with players experiencing an ecosystem in which food is scarce and predators are ready to eat you...although sometimes you're the predator looking for that scarce food. You can adapt your species to the environment by playing traits like fast to evade predators, nesting to grow your population, and climbing to reach fruit high above ground.

Nature will have five thematic modules — Jurassic, Flight, Natural Disasters, Arctic Tundra, and Amazon Rainforest — available at launch, and you can use 0-3 of them in a game to modify (or not) its length and complexity. As Crapuchettes writes:

The base game, Nature, is a meaty filler that is can be taught and played in 45 minutes. Each expansion will change core rules to dramatically affect the emotional feel of the game and the strategy:

—Add one expansion for a 60-minute game that's roughly the complexity of Evolution.
—Add two expansions for a 90-minute game that's roughly the complexity of Climate.
—Add three expansions for a 120-minute game that's roughly the complexity of Terraforming Mars

NorthStar is polling to determine which modules to release in 2026, and it welcomes playtesters who want to help see how everything fits together.

Evolution in action Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• The cartoon short "Steamboat Willie" entered the public domain in 2024, along with Tigger, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence.

I'm not sure whether designers will rush to create games out of this material — especially the first item given that Disney still owns everything else related to Mickey Mouse — but over time the public domain pool will only continue to grow, a pool that game designers and publishers will return to repeatedly for a chance to put their own spin on a story or group of characters known around the world, as with the announcement from U.S. publisher Crafty Games of Knights of the Round Table, a design by Jonny Pac that will see release in 2025.


Here's an overview of this 2-4 player game:

In each game of Knights of the Round Table, players choose a cycle of Arthurian myth to play, setting the tone and starting rules. They rally a company of knights and Arthurian personalities, deploying them to construct Camelot, repel invader hordes, and quest for the Holy Grail. Through their choices, players sculpt a unique narrative and unlock new modules until the grail is discovered, and a winner is crowned high king!

The game features dozens of silkscreened wood pieces, a huge game board, and a 3D castle that players build during play. Multiple game modules allow for high variability and replayability across many aspects of Arthurian myth, with the intertwining of themes and mechanisms allowing players to organically create their own spin on these legends.

• "Alice in Wonderland" remains a source of inspiration for game designers given the rich variety of ways to approach this fantastic world.


In 2024, new publisher Borogove Games plans to crowdfund Rolling in Wonderland, a design for 2-4 players from Daniel Alves:

Players become children who, just like Alice, stumble into Wonderland and meet all the famous characters from the works of Lewis Carroll. During play, you use actions to discover cards, make friends, and use your mushrooms to execute powerful combos in a highly strategic action-selection/dice-drafting system — all with the long-term goal of earning points.

• And where Alice starts to walk, Cthulhu follows. A crossover between these IPs is inevitable, but until that happens we'll have to focus on the latest game design to draw on the works of H.P. Lovecraft — Cohors Cthulhu: Tactics, a horror-themed, solitaire/co-operative game from Modiphius Entertainment that's meant as a companion of sorts to the Cohors Cthulhu RPG that Modiphius crowdfunded in 2023 for release in 2024. An overview:

Cohors Cthulhu: Tactics is set in the Cohors Cthulhu universe during the height of Imperial Rome. You begin your heroic journey as one of a handful of survivors of an ambush, desperately trying to escape the Mythos-ridden mists of a Germanic forest. As your heroes grow in experience and power, you will fulfill your destiny, becoming the leader of a powerful legion and facing the avatars of the Outer Gods themselves in full-scale war.

The game is meant to fuse the strategic nuance of tabletop wargames with the immersive narrative of role playing games. Cohors Cthulhu: Tactics will feature a wide range of 28mm miniatures in both resin and 3D print at-home STL files. The miniatures range features Roman Centurions, scoundrels, nobles, hunters, priests, druids, assassins, soldiers, and warriors. Facing them will be the full might of the Outer Gods: The Cult of Mormo with their Priests, Servitors, Ghouls and Overlords of Mormo, Teufel Hounds, Fluttering Fiends, Sheehad, Elder Things, Chosen and Die Draugr.

Modiphius notes that "Kickstarter backers will have an exclusive opportunity to grab one of several powerful Avatars of the Outer Gods in resin such as the Star Spawn of Cthulhu. Stretch Goals will unlock new factions, such as the Deep Ones, Mi-Go, and the corrupt Herjan's Horde, plus more mythos creatures, additional missions, and new gameplay options."

I'm not sure how "exclusive" these might be given that the Outer Gods appear willing to partner with as many publishers as step up...

• Oh, hey, I should have been more optimistic...or pessimistic. Not sure which one is appropriate here, but in any case Steamboat Willie World has announced a Kickstarter for Steamboat Willie playing cards...


...while in May 2024 new publisher Simply Play Games plans to crowdfund the tabletop game Steamboat Willie: Dark Days.


Here's the teaser description:

Take the role of our classic hero, "Steamboat Willie", or one of his pals in this modern return to the Forbidden Seas in this epic 2-4 player board game.

Return to the most dangerous seas to help rescue Caroline the Cow as she tries to get on board his steamboat to safety. In these mysterious seas, there are tales of sea monsters and pirates looking to capture his booty!

Take the role of our hero, Mickey Mouse "Steamboat Willie," or one of his pals — Minnie, Pete, Parrot, or Goat — in this epic 2-4 player table top game.

Given the quality of this promotional image from the upcoming BackerKit campaign, I anticipate this game being a high-quality release that will endure for decades and become a treasure that our descendants will look forward to entering the public domain in the 22nd century so that they can riff on it themselves.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• Jules Messaud's Akropolis won the 2023 Japan Boardgame Prize issued by Yumoa, a non-profit organization founded in 2003 that annually honors games that are "considered to have contributed the most to the spread of board games".

The other titles nominated for the award were Phil Walker-Harding's Super Mega Lucky Box and Challengers! from designers Johannes Krenner and Markus Slawitscheck. This latter title, which won the 2023 Kennerspiel des Jahres in Germany, won the voting section of the 2023 Japan Boardgame Prize, receiving more than twice as many points as second-place finisher Darwin's Journey from Simone Luciani and Nestore Mangone. Maxime Tardif's Earth had broader support than Darwin's Journey, but at a lower level, landing in third place. (Voters ranked five games, with first place receiving 5 points, second place 4 points, etc.)

• The American Tabletop Awards have announced their 2024 winners for games released in the U.S. in 2023. The winners and their categories are:

—Early gamers: Blob Party, by Pam Walls and WizKids
—Casual games: Sea Salt & Paper, by Bruno Cathala, Théo Rivière, and Bombyx
—Strategy games: Thunder Road: Vendetta, by Dave Chalker, Brett Myers, and Restoration Games
—Complex games: The White Castle, by Isra C., Shei S., and Devir

If you visit the link above, you'll find other ATTA-recommended and -nominated titles in those categories.



• Speaking of awards, as a BGG user you are invited to nominate games released in 2023 for the 18th annual Golden Geek Awards. The nomination phase will end at 11:59 PM CDT on Sunday, April 21, 2023, with voting on the top nominees taking place over the next ten days. BGG owner Scott Alden gives details on the nomination process here.


• Someone on the Saturday Night Live staff must be a fan of Ticket to Ride because while this skit from April 6, 2024 focuses on Jumanji, Alan R. Moon's classic train game also plays a starring role:

Youtube Video
• While Ravensburger publishes games, it's best known as a jigsaw puzzle manufacturer, and a paywalled article in The New York Times from Derrick Bryson Taylor details a long-running legal battle between the German publisher and the Italian government over the rights to reproduce Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man" drawing in a jigsaw puzzle. An excerpt:

At the center of the dispute is Italy's cultural heritage and landscape code, which was adopted in 2004 and allows cultural institutions, like museums, to request concession fees and payments for the commercial reproduction of cultural properties, like "Vitruvian Man."

That code is at odds with European Union law, which states that works in the public domain (like "Vitruvian Man") are not subject to copyright.

For more than a decade, Ravensburger sold a 1,000-piece puzzle with the image of the famed drawing. But in 2019, the Italian government and the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, where the famous work and other da Vinci pieces are on display, used the Italian code to demand that Ravensburger stop selling the puzzle and pay a licensing fee.

The article details other instances of the Italian government protesting commercial uses of Italian cultural landmarks, such as a 2023 case in which "a court in Florence ruled against GQ Italia for using an image of the David statue on the cover of one of its magazines in 2020 without permission".

• Since I've already diverged into jigsaw puzzles, we close with a look at a trio of jigsaw puzzles that are a project of BGG advertising manager Chad Krizan, who also runs the company Puzzle Bomb with his wife Caylyn, so I want to highlight their Spring 2024 collection of wooden puzzles. I've watched Chad doodle many times over the years, and it's fascinating to see his work transformed in this way.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• German publisher KOSMOS has teased games that it will release in the second half of 2024, starting with German editions of Cascadia: Rolling Hills, Cascadia: Rolling Rivers, Linx, and The Gang, the latter of which will debut from KOSMOS in the U.S. in Q3 2024 and which Inka and Markus Brand described on Instagram as a "super good game" that even in March 2024 they can see landing a Spiel des Jahres nomination in 2025. Hmm...


Speaking of the SdJ, Wolfgang Lüdtke's SdJ recommended title Caesar & Cleopatra, which debuted from KOSMOS in 1997, will be released in a new edition.


As previously announced in January 2024, KOSMOS will release the card game Faraway from Johannes Goupy and Corentin Lebrat in German in the second half of 2024.

KOSMOS will also release German editions of three titles from Dutch publisher Identity Games. Battle Royale is a tactical action game for 2-4 players in which "you play cards to position your characters cleverly, then you roll the doom dice...and little by little, the island arena grows smaller and smaller. With skill and luck, you try to keep your figures on the island for as long as possible. Create majorities, push your opponent's figures off the island, and stay away from the explosions. Continue to fight for space until only one player remains."


Medical Mysteries: New York Emergency Room and Medical Mysteries: Miami Flatline (!) are co-operative games in which you encounter patients and need to figure out what's wrong with them. Each box has four patients of varying difficulties waiting for you, along with a tutorial case. No prior medical knowledge is required.



In terms of new titles, Monkey Fun is a game for 1-4 players from Jürgen P. K. Grunau in which you try to claim a connected area as quickly as possible with your gang of monkeys. The cards you play indicate on which square you can place a monkey, but the other monkeys are already waiting to snatch this space from you...

(I will confess that this might not be a new design as I'm not familiar with Grunau's dozens of published games.)

Read more »

by Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance

The story of Word Traveler — which is being released in April 2024 from Office Dog — is both very short and very long. It's a party-ish game — emphasis on the "ish" — and like most games of its kind, it's based around a simple activity in which scoring is relatively secondary. This core activity took shape quickly and didn't change much throughout development, so in a sense "most" of the game was created in a short period of time. However, the devil's in the details as they say, and like Boo in DragonBall Z, the game went through many, many transformations before it would reach its final form.

The premise is simple: Players are traveling around a city, but since they don't know the local language, they must rely on imprecise indications to get around. The idea is translated mechanically by having players want to move around a grid of images to score points based on their personal map card (think Codenames), but they cannot do so themselves, so they must communicate to the other players how they'd like to be moved by creating a sequence made of a combination of direction tokens and communication cards.

In "short", Word Traveler is a co-operative communication programming game. Combining communication and programming was the thing I was the most excited about as it allowed players to create a sentence of sorts, one in which each "word" (move) would inform the overall path you're trying to take.

Instead of going through a lengthy explanation of how the core activity of the game works concretely, I think it's best if I show you an example. Word Traveler is one of those games that's a bit awkward to explain in written form but super easy to teach visually. This photo's from one of the first iterations of the game, back when the game was called "PanoraMag" (short for "Panorama Magazine"...which was a terrible name):


For their first move — as indicated by the row of cards at the bottom of the image — the red player wants to go up to the image that's the most "circle" (probably the tiger's face). For their second move, they want to go up again to the image that's the most "royal" or "regal" (probably the forbidden city). After that, they go right to the image that's the least "city" (when placed on its dark side, a card is meant to be read as "the least"). After that, they go left to the image that's the most "food" (probably the chopsticks), then they use a drone (more on that later), and finally they go down to the image that's the least "music" (probably the containers).

That particular sequence is relatively easy to decode (in my opinion), but in practice players will often want to refer to past and future instructions if they're unsure where to go for a particular move, hence the "sentence" aspect of the communication. For example:


Here the first move is a little bit ambiguous. What's the least "food/plant" image to the right of the red player between a desert, a motorbike, and a plane? This one's tough, but for the second move they tell us to go down to the image that's the most "weapon", which works really well with the policeman in the last column, which could indicate that they're going to the plane for their first move.

As you probably guessed from the above examples, the game used to take place in China and players communicated with icons instead of words. This was back in 2019, and since Decrypto's release was relatively recent, I wanted to avoid doing another word-based game. As for the Chinese theme, I liked the aesthetics of it, but it wasn't kept after the game got signed.

At first, players had access to three different maps, each with its own shape and special power: Beijing (associated with the drone, which allowed you to visit an extra location adjacent to you once per round), Shanghai (associated with the bridge, which you could cross once per round to reach the other half of the map), and China itself (associated with the plane, which allowed you to move non-orthogonally). The maps also featured hotels, and if you ended your turn on one, you would earn one extra card (and point) for the next round.

The maps not taken...
Unfortunately, this version of the game had many problems. Having the direction tokens and the icon cards together was a nice idea to reduce the component count, but it wasn't great for readability and also made it difficult for players to use multiple icons to point to a single destination, which a lot of players were asking for. Having complex maps composed of single images made the game frustratingly long to set up. Hotels were nice, but the extra cards and points tended to advantage players who were already doing well. I won't even go into the whole letter/number system, but suffice to say it was unnecessarily complex as well.

The game was soon changed to feature a single square map, which allowed me to move the images from single cards to 2x3 boards for a much faster set-up.


As for the other problems, they would get fixed only after I signed the game to Repos Production near the end of 2019...

"Wait!", you say, "Repos Production?! But the game's being released by Office Dog!"

Indeed, this game actually got signed to two different publishers, once in 2019 and again in 2022. This was an extremely valuable learning experience as each publisher had a (somewhat) different vision of the game and didn't come to the same conclusions regarding many of its systems.

So, first, Repos. They wanted to integrate the game into their Concept line as both games featured similar icon-based communication. They quickly did away with the Chinese theme and changed it to a more globally relatable theme of traveling the world. They also wanted a more illustrated style compared to the travel photos I had been using thus far. Furthermore, they separated the direction tokens and the icon cards for all the reasons I explained above.


When I first showed Repos the game, each round players would draw a new map card (i.e., the Codenames-like cards that tell each player where they want to go), but they wanted players to keep the map for the entire game so that each round would feel more like a part of a complete experience. The map cards went through a number of different iterations in an effort to accommodate that: first, there were tokens to represent the different locations that players would flip face down when they visited them, then small sheets of paper like you see in roll-and-writes on which players would note their path using a pencil, then dry-erase cards, then small boards that you kept behind a screen and on which you placed cubes to indicate what you had visited.

The map cards themselves also changed quite a bit:


Gone were the letters and the numbers, which had been replaced by small icons. A number of tokens showing these icons would be drawn from a bag at the start of each round, and players would divide them among themselves depending on what was easier for them to visit. Gone also were the hotels; players would earn additional cards and movements automatically to simplify things.

A lot of smaller things changed as well. For example, players used to be able to trade communication cards with one another, but Repos wanted to shorten the game's length, so that idea was scrapped. The special actions like the plane or the drone were also scrapped. A sand timer was used to track time, then it was gone, then one appeared again. A lot of different things were tried, too much for me to list them all.

All in all, I think most of the changes Repos did were a step in the right direction. The game was simplified in some aspects, complexified in others. They worked a lot on it, which is why it came as such a blow when they told me in early 2022 that they wouldn't make the game after all. Their reasoning (at least the one they gave me) was that they wanted the game to cost the same as Concept, but that they didn't see a way to make it work without making drastic (and detrimental) changes to the game. This was the third game of mine to get canceled during the pandemic. I know these things happen relatively frequently, but to have three games canceled in such a short period of time, all of which had all undergone lengthy developments, I almost stopped making games right there and then. It was soul crushing.

Still, I eventually recovered and started to work on my games again, including this one. As luck would have it, Bryan Bornmueller from Office Dog contacted me around that time to see whether I had any prototypes to pitch them. They were a new studio under the Asmodee banner and wanted games from freelance designers such as myself. They really liked "PanoraMag", and after a few tests they decided to start working on it in earnest.

One of the first big changes they did was to switch icons for words on the communication cards. One of the issues with icons, in this case, is that there's sort of two interpretation layers: First you need to figure out what the icon means for the player who used it, then you need to figure out which image they are pointing at. With words, you (mostly) have only the second layer, which makes sequences easier to interpret. They reverted the change that Repos had done regarding drawing only one map card for the whole game and went back to drawing a new map card each round since it was easier to manage and required fewer components. The maps were also simplified, with just 1s and 2s to indicate the number of points gained from visiting a place instead of a more complex system of icons and tokens.

On the thematic side of things, rather than having players travel the whole world using 2x3 boards made of a random assortment of images from around the globe, Office Dog preferred to have players visit more specific locations. They decided to have four different boards, each one a city illustrated by an artist from that place, which I thought was a really cool idea. Finally, the name was changed to Word Traveler, which was miles better than mine.

On display at GAMA Expo 2024
All in all, I'm really quite happy with the work they've done, and development went extremely smoothly! After almost five years, the game is finally seeing the light of day. It was a long road, but hopefully the game is better for it.

Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

In 2014, Alchemists appeared from designer Matúš Kotry and publisher Czech Games Edition. In the intervening decade, Kotry has become a father, and to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the game, he and CGE have come together again to release Little Alchemists. This new design due out in Q3 2024 shares elements with the original release, but is aimed at players aged 7 and up, with these players mixing potions and selling them to customers.


Here's an overview:

Will you surpass your teachers' knowledge and grow up to become the best alchemists in the land? Let's find out! It's time to grab your potion ingredients, sharpen your deduction skills, and get mixing!

Little Alchemists is a family-friendly deduction game that's designed to grow with the curious minds of young players. The game starts with simple concepts and mechanisms; you'll start by gathering and combining ingredients for brewing potions to sell. However, as you collect keys by achieving your potion-making goals, you'll unlock new chapters that gradually add more components, mechanisms, and complexity to the experience.

Not sure how to make potions? No sweat! Potion craft takes mere seconds with the free Little Alchemists companion app. To make a potion, players select two ingredient tiles, then scan them using the companion app loaded onto a tablet or smartphone. This reveals the combined result and lets players acquire and mark the corresponding potion knowledge on their secret player board.

The proud parentWith each potion you make, you'll begin to discover the secrets that lie at the heart of alchemy. Players will have to use clever deductions to figure out the arcane properties of each ingredient, then they can use that knowledge to their advantage throughout the game!

Over the course of seven chapters that unlock over multiple playthroughs, players will learn and master many new facets of the alchemy trade, preparing them for what's to come. Each chapter is designed as a replayable experience that expands on the previous chapter, with new layers of game mechanisms that add more subtle depth and complexity over time. Also, fully exploring the world of Little Alchemists will introduce you to many of the concepts from and better prepare you for the original Alchemists game.

For a hint of what awaits inside the box, note the pyramidal ingredient chart in the lower left of the image below. The initial game has you play with six types of ingredients, but over time you can add a seventh and eighth by attaching new "walls" on the pyramid. The app is designed to teach players the entire game as needed to assist play with youngsters.

Little Alchemists will debut at Gen Con 2024 in August.

Prototype version shown at GAMA Expo 2024 Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• Designer Friedemann Friese of 2F-Spiele is no stranger to trick-taking games, having released Foppen in 1995 (then re-mixing it as Fool! in 2018) and Stich-Meister in 2010.

In Q4 2024, he will release a new twist on the genre in Fischen, which Rio Grande Games will release as Fishing. Here's an overview of this 3-5 player game:

In Fishing, you try to catch as many tricks as possible over eight rounds, with each card you catch being worth 1 point.You then use your caught cards for the next round — and if you didn't catch enough tricks to fill your hand, you'll draw fresh cards from the ocean stack, which will introduce new cards for you fishers to fight over.

In more detail, at the start of each round, you have 8-13 cards in hand, depending on the player count and the round. In the first round, the cards go from 1-10 in four colors. Standard trick-taking rules apply, with players needing to follow the color led and the highest card of the led suit winning the trick.

New cards come into play from the ocean stack in waves, with higher-value cards in the four colors, a green trump suit from 1-16, 0 cards that let you snag a card from the trick, and special-powered buoy cards that can always be played into a trick regardless of what you have in hand. With buoys, you can steal the lead or determine which color must lead the next trick, force players to pass cards or lose points; you can even steal all other cards in a trick, ideally netting yourself huge fish for use next round.

At the end of each round, score 1 point for each card you caught. Whoever lands the most points after eight rounds wins.

It's interesting to see Friese drawing from Fabled Fruit and his Fast Forward series in which more cards are introduced to the game over time. Rand. did something similar in his trick-taking game Tall Tales, but Fishing introduces a trump suit and special-powered cards, in addition to higher numbers, with no one knowing what you're initially drawing other than a card from level one, level two, etc.

What's more, I'm intrigued by the idea of you using the cards you catch in one round as "bait" in the next round. After all, you might be catching junky low numbers, and sure, you score for them at the end of this round, but how well will they serve you next round, assuming you draw them? Maybe they can actually be a boon, allowing you to run a color that no one else has...until the trump cards start showing up. In any case, I'm looking forward to this one.

• Another SPIEL Essen 24 release from 2F-Spiele is Free Ride USA, a spinoff title that features the same gameplay as 2021's Free Ride:

In Free Ride USA, you are one of several people in charge of building railway lines, connecting the cities in the United States, and carrying passengers to those cities. The game board shows 45 cities connected by a network of potential routes, and all railway lines built will be one of three types: lines owned by you, lines owned by fellow players, and state-owned lines. When you travel along railway lines, you pay nothing to travel on your lines and state-owned lines. To travel on a fellow player's line, however, you must pay them 1 coin, which converts their line to state-owned. From then on, traveling on that line is free for all players. As coins are limited, you should carefully balance the building of your lines with the conversion of fellow players' lines to state-owned lines.

Where do you want to build? At the start of play, each player drafts part of a travel route. Multiple travel routes are available for choosing, and each travel route consists of three cards. When you choose a route, you take either the first and second cards or the second and third cards as your starting and ending point (in that order). Return the unchosen card of that route to the box.

Once the third deck is empty, you can either withdraw from the game with uncompleted routes (returning those cards to the box) or keep taking turns until you finish all your routes, at which point you immediately gain 1 coin and withdraw. In either situation, you earn 1 coin (and do nothing else) on each subsequent turn. Once all players have withdrawn, you tally your score, earning 3 points for each coin, 5 points for the first card you have of a city, and 2 points for each other card you have of a city. (Each of the 45 cities appears once in each of the three decks.) Whoever has the most points wins.

For more on the gameplay, you can read or watch me rave about Free Ride here. The 45 cities in Free Ride USA are color-coded in groups of five, ideally making it easier for players to get a sense of how long a route might take to travel with your train.

In addition, instead of nine cities around the perimeter of the game board starting with two coins — with the first player to move their train to such a city collecting those coins — coins are added to the game on a somewhat random basis. Ten cities each are designated as east coast cities or west coast cities, and whenever a potential route has an east-west pairing, say, Philadephia to Salt Lake City, two coins are added to this route from the reserve. If a player claims that route, they collect those coins, which means players have more of an incentive to grab long routes since they can use those coins to purchase rail tokens without needing to spend a turn to do so, while also converting others' routes to state-owned. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Tokyo Game Market next takes place on April 27-28, 2024, and here's a tiny sampling of new games that will be presented at that show.

• Designer Saashi of Saashi & Saashi will release Bus & Stop, a card game featuring art from Takako Takarai that challenges 2-4 players to be efficient bus drivers:

Bus & Stop is a card game in which you compete as bus drivers to bring passengers to their desired destinations, while avoiding overcrowding.

On a turn, you either pick up or drop off. To pick up, choose all of the passenger cards of one color from the row waiting at the bus stop, then place them in your bus — that is, the area in front of you, which can hold at most ten cards. Senior citizens aren't going far, so you score them immediately instead of placing them on the bus.

To drop off, choose a group of passengers on your bus that match one of the available destination cards — for example, all men, all girls, or one passenger of each color — then remove these passengers from your bus and place them under the card. You score points for each card depending on how many people you delivered at once, so aim for large groups. Whenever a player drops off, everyone else can make one of their matching passengers skedaddle, removing them from the bus and placing them in a personal scoring pile with their senior citizens.

When the bus stop can't be refilled with passengers or only a certain number of destination cards remain, the game ends. Tally your score, earning 1 point for each single card and the listed points for each destination card. If your bus is empty, congratulations! You earn a depot bonus for not stranding passengers on your bus. They will thank you for not doing that...

While Saashi & Saashi will debut Bus & Stop at Game Market, pre-orders will ship at the end of May 2024 with a general retail release in June 2024.

• At the previous Game Market in December 2023, designer Fumiko Shimizu self-published approximately fifty copies of ダイイングメッセージ (Dying Message) under the brand Cinematrick.

Now Oink Games has licensed the design and will release a new edition — solely in Japanese right now — at Game Market in April 2024, with a retail release in early May 2024.


Here's how to play:

You've been murdered! Well, almost, you're not dead yet, so you want to communicate the identity of who the killer is, but you have a limited number of tools to make that happen: a small number of cards with obscure marks on them and...yourself. Yes, your dying body. Maybe you can arrange the cards in some manner to convey information. Maybe your still fingers can point to — or obscure — parts of the cards to increase the clarity of your dying thought.

If the clues are easy to understand, they will be destroyed by the culprit; if they are difficult, they will not be communicated to anyone, and your death will not be avenged, so leave an exquisite dying message.

The other players in Dying Message are detectives, and they make inferences based on the limited information available. Detectives can co-operate or confront one another, and whether the deduction turns out to be good or bad will depend upon their discussion.

Looking at the pic above, I was like, wait, is that a pool of blood on the table? Is that part of the game?! And it turns out that yes, it is, with the designer noting on Twitter that the blood pool on the back of the instruction manual of the first edition is now made of felt, presumably to make your final seconds more comfortable.

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• Oink has a second licensed title that it plans to debut at Game Market ahead of an early May 2024 retail release: Moving Wild, which designer Chris Priscott originally crowdfunded in 2021 and released in 2022 under the name Zuuli and publishing brand Unfringed.

In Moving Wild, up to six players draft cards, with everyone choosing a card simultaneously, passing what's left, choosing another card, etc. Once all the cards have been selected, players each assemble their own zoo from the enclosures, animals, and upgrades they've collected.


Enclosures have a size limit and can take animals from 1-3 terrains: desert, grass, or water. Animals need to be placed in an enclosure of a matching landscape, and they have a size on them, so you can't just shove them all in the same enclosure. Fierce animals can't be enclosed with friendly ones unless you have an upgrade to do so. Animals are worth points if enclosed, with some enclosures having multipliers for those animals. Some animals have special conditions on them that grant you bonus points if met.

The game lasts three rounds, with everyone scoring after each round, then whoever has the most points wins.

• Happy City designer Toshiki Sato has a new title coming from their own さとーふぁみりあ (Sato Familie) publishing brand: Merchants of Sky Islands.


Merchants of Sky Islands is a 2-4 player game, and each player starts with a random stack of ten hexagonal island tiles, taking two of them in hand. Each tile is a combination of island parts on a background of air — after all, "sky islands". A four-hex starting tile is placed in the middle of the table.

On a turn, add a tile from your hand to the table, matching land and sky on adjacent edges. Gain the appropriate resource (or 1 VP) based on the color of the airship on the tile you placed and all adjacent tiles, then use resources to place buildings on the board, with each building costing one resource in each of the three colors: a trading house goes on an island tile to show your influence; a tower is placed next to one of your trading houses on a towerless island, then you gain points equal to the number of trading houses on that island; and a port goes under one of your portless trading houses, giving you the resource on that tile at the start of each turn. Discard to three resources in hand at turn's end.


After ten turns, the game ends, and you score each of the islands on the board, whether they're only linked (that is, connected) or closed (with the island being completely surrounded by air). Each towered trading house in your color gives you 2 influence, and each other trading house 1 influence. Whoever has the most influence on a linked island scores 1 point per tile, and the player with the secondmost influence gets half that. Scores are doubled for closed islands. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• U.S. publisher Inside Up Games has announced an expansion for Maxime Tardif's Earth, and as much as I'd like it to be named "Moon", it is not.

Instead it's titled Earth: Abundance, and the only detail at the moment is that it contains "new player interactions and opportunities to curate your hand" and a Kickstarter campaign for this item — as well as add-ons from the initial Earth campaign — will launch on April 22, 2024 to coincide with Earth Day.

• In March 2024, Restoration Games crowdfunded Thunder Road: Vendetta – Carnival of Chaos, an expansion for Dave Chalker and Brett Myers' Thunder Road: Vendetta in which you're not racing to a finish line, but instead competing in an arena with powerful new weapons — or material from the original game and expansions — to collect more scrap than anyone else.

This expansion also includes components to add a fifth player to the game, and it's due to Kickstarter backers in November 2024.


• The second edition of Dominion: Cornucopia & Guilds, which combines Donald X. Vaccarino's two Dominion expansions Guilds and Cornucopia, was released in March 2024 by publisher Rio Grande Games, with this edition featuring eight new kingdom cards.

As with previous updates to the Dominion game line, these new cards will be sold separately as an update pack.


• Rio Grande Games has also updated the release date for Dice Realms: Trade Expansion to "Spring 2024", a.k.a. Q2 2024.

• Devir is taking an interesting approach to its (potential) release of Mille Fiori: The Masterpieces, an expansion for Reiner Knizia's 2021 game Mille Fiori.

Along the lines of GMT Games' P500 pre-order program, Devir has launched Devir 500, writing that "At times we get requests from customers to publish titles, and the Devir 500 Project was created to turn those titles into reality. They can be board games, expansions, or even RPGs. The project started with some Spanish language titles, but has worked well enough that we will now offer it for projects in English and other languages."

Mille Fiori: The Masterpieces is the first such English-language project, although Devir's edition will include rules in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian as well to match its base game. The Devir 500 project for this title has 454 reservations to date, with no deadline listed for when Devir will pull the plug on this project, although presumably the publisher won't sit around forever waiting for order #500.

• In its monthly newsletter, German publisher Feuerland Spiele has been posting previews of Gaia Project: The Lost Fleet, an expansion for 2017's Gaia Project from designers Jens Drögemüller and Helge Ostertag, and now it's posted the rulebook for this late Q3 2024 release on BGG.

Read more »

Publisher: Chaosium

“The Calling of the Blood” is a modern-day Call of Cthulhu scenario, set in the countryside of Sweden. It’s intended for 3-4 investigators (suggested pre-gens are included) who don’t know each other from the beginning and don’t have any previous knowledge of the Cthulhu Mythos, but could be of virtually any nationality, age, gender, or educational background, and in any line of work. They are all, however, of Swedish descent - but probably don’t think of themselves as Swedish.

In the scenario, the investigators - out of curiosity - all submit DNA samples to an online genealogy service and are then offered grants to travel to Sweden and learn about their family history. But a dark secret awaits them.

“The Calling of the Blood” takes inspiration from the movie Midsommar, and the TV show Allt för Sverige (marketed in the United States as The Great Swedish Adventure), but is very much its own thing. It contains:

• 27 pages of Swedish countryside consternation, with references to blood and body horror
• 5 pre-generated investigator characters (but players are more than welcome to create their own)
• Floor maps and handouts
• 1 brand new Mythos creature
• Historical background on the massive Swedish emigration during the 19th and early 20th centuries

The scenario is a part of the Northern Lights and Darkness collection, where writers from the Nordic countries create modern-day stand-alone cosmic horror scenarios set in each writer's native country.

Price: $4.95 Read more »

Publisher: Taylor Lane

Start your journey of strategy and survival with 'System Neutral Rules for PCs Owning a Medieval Business'—the definitive guide for bringing medieval commerce to life in your tabletop RPGs. This handbook seamlessly integrates with any TTRPG system and draws on real-world medieval economics[1] to provide an immersive experience. 

Run an inn, manage a trading post, or dominate the local money market! Whether you're battling plagues, navigating wartime trade disruptions, or dealing with the whims of royal decree, your success hinges on your strategic decisions—without any access to stock markets or modern banking. Thrive in the chaotic world of medieval trade. Will you make your fortune? Or will you lose it all?

Go from rags to riches (and maybe back again) as you build your medieval business. Grab your copy today!

[1] By which I mean "I minored in Economics in college, and then I read a bunch of economic history publications about 800s to 1300s rates of return on investment"

Price: $5.00 Read more »

Publisher: Table 30 Press
Price: $2.99 Read more »

Publisher: Flying Goblin

Map Bundle

We present a collection of 46 handcrafted, digital (no AI used in the process) maps. Spanning a range of biomes, seasons, and locales, you'll find everything from wilderness landscapes to detailed house interiors and regional maps.

All encounter maps have a day/day+grid/night/night+grid version. For some of them, we made a winter version in day/day+grid/night/night+grid modes.

All regional maps have day/night versions, one of them has a winter version.

All interior maps have a day/day+grid/night/night+grid version. For some of them, we made a winter version in day/day+grid/night/night+grid modes.

In total, the bundle contains a staggering 238 maps.

All of them are saved in 6K, jpg format.

Full list of maps

Encounter Maps

1. Orc Settlement 

2. Lake Sanctuary

3. Infernal  Crossing 

4. Jungle Camp by the Fall

5. Frozen River Crossing

6. Caravan Rest

7. Tropical Beach

8. Ambush Site

9. Arctic Camp

10. Mountain Slope

11. Badlands 3

12. Badlands1 +2

13. Goblin Camp

14. Forgotten Ziggurat

15. Threeway_River

16. Village Ruin

17. Hidden Lake

18. Fishing Village

19. Underground Lake

20. Rickety Fortress

21. Foggy Marsh

22. Windy Beach

23. The Runic Circle

24. Reedy River

25. Village feast

26. Pit of Low Stakes

27. Pine Forest

28. Desert Wall

 

INTERIOR Maps

1. Farmstead by the River

2. Roadhouse

3. Goodnight Inn

4. Peaceful Dwelling

5. Elevated Farm

6. Obsidian castle

7. Prison map

8. Heart of the Dragon Magical Emporium

 

REGIONAL Maps

1. World Tree

2. Northern Village

3. Giant Hand

4. Oasis Outpost

5. Orc Stronghold

6. Arctic Outpost

7. Coastal Town

8. Robie’s Terrortory

 

DUNGEONS Maps

1. Desecrated Crypt

2. Ice Cave

Price: $4.99 Read more »

Publisher: Free League Publishing

Prepare to test the hostile waters of the war-torn world of TWILIGHT: 2000! By the writer of the Twilight 2000 adventure, Rook’s Gambit, the Korean Peninsula Sourcebook, Tara Romanescu: Romania Sourcebook (with Clayton Oliver), and The Poisoned Chalice comes a new nautical vehicles sourcebook for 4^th edition TWILIGHT: 2000. Included within its pages, you will encounter:

• 18 new, fully-statted water craft from the USA, USSR, Poland, NATO, Sweden, and Finland 
• Supplemental Travel and Combat rules for Hovercraft
• 8 fully-statted hovercraft

Price: $4.00 Read more »

Publisher: HoloGrounds

Some of these prisoners have been convicted of serious crimes, some have been convicted of smaller cases, and some of them are innocent at all.

The striped uniform is a very simple way to complicate the life of a prisoner in the old days. Because if he tries to escape, he will be easily identified.

The pack contains 9 tokens:

• 3 top-down Animated tokens (.WEBM)
• 3 top-down Static tokens (.PNG, .WEBP)
• 3 Portrait tokens (.PNG, .WEBP)

This map was supported by our Patrons. Have a great games!

Price: $1.00 Read more »

Publisher: HoloGrounds

Some of these prisoners have been convicted of serious crimes, some have been convicted of smaller cases, and some of them are innocent at all.

Weapons are not so easy to get in prison, but some prisoners have enough bare hands to kill someone.

Some prisoners make shivs - homemade knives and daggers to stab their enemies or even guards.

During riots and mass showdowns, prisoners are armed with improvised objects - sticks, bats and pipes.

During riots and escapes, prisoners can take away firearms from the guards and then they become even more dangerous.

The pack contains 36 tokens:

• 12 top-down Animated tokens (.WEBM)
• 12 top-down Static tokens (.PNG, .WEBP)
• 12 Portrait tokens (.PNG, .WEBP)

This map was supported by our Patrons. Have a great games!

Price: $4.99 Read more »

Publisher: Seth Giolle

               Shielle-Aj boasts a cooperative and competitive outlet and comes in one, compact unit. Everything folds and pops together to become a game you can transport anywhere as you travel from home to home or as you head off on vacation! The gems, base, and octagonal cannister are all 3D-printable and fit into a colourful unit!

               The Shielle-Aj Islands are deep in the middle of the Coloured Seas in the world I created for the Trial of Millosai, my novel series. It’s a dangerous place filled with heavy storms, large sea creatures like the Bloren and Gowette, the creatures depicted on the Cannister Lid on print-out! This, of course means that many of sailor has ventured out into these Coloured Seas, for war, work, and plunder; as such, many of sailing vessel, galleon, frigate, and adventurer’s tug, have gone under and rest under those coloured waves.

               Plenty of Seas for plundering.

               If you can get past those Bloren and Gowette …

Price: $2.00 Read more »

Publisher: HoloGrounds

An evil force unlike anything else is lurking and watching. They are impatient, but always waiting for a favorable opportunity. They weave intrigues that cover the whole world with insidious plans. They are everywhere, but always invisible.

Ratfolk fighters may seem clumsy and unprepared, but with the help of speed and quantitative advantage, they can turn out to be serious enemies.

Ratfolks are the perfect spies and killers. Silent and seeing in the dark, they can sneak anywhere and eliminate their target with a dagger or crossbow

Natural curiosity pushes ratfolk to experiments. Those of them who survive become alchemists. They prepare poisons, acids and bombs for their rat army

Shamans are adepts of dark magic. They wear masks that hide their faces and wield deadly spells.

The pack contains 36 tokens:

• 12 top-down Animated tokens (.WEBM)
• 12 top-down Static tokens (.PNG, .WEBP)
• 12 Portrait tokens (.PNG, .WEBP)

This map was supported by our Patrons. Have a great games!

Price: $4.99 Read more »

Licensed games usually take the approach of presenting material that can happen far away from the canon events of the setting. This works especially well in settings like Star Trek or Star Wars, where there is a literal galaxy of locations available for storytelling. Player characters may hear about canon events, and there may be a butterfly effect on some of their options, but the assumption of the game is that the player characters aren’t going to be directly confronting and potentially contradicting the fictitious history of the setting.

Despite this, there are some fans who want exactly that. If they are playing in a game about a given setting, they want to be present for the events they have read about or seen on screen. They may or may not want to step into the shoes of an existing character, either by playing that character, or by playing a character that replaces the canon character in the game table’s narrative. If you want to play through a campaign where it’s possible for Luke Skywalker to miss the shot that destroys the Death Star because a PC failed to keep a TIE Fighter off his tail, that’s largely on the game facilitator to navigate.

Modiphius has taken an interesting approach to this with their Dune: Adventures in the Imperium RPG. While it largely assumes that player characters will be engaging in house politics in other corners of the galaxy or touching upon Arrakis in moments between galaxy shaking events, it has also introduced products that directly engage the canon narrative. The primary example of this has been the Agents of Dune boxed set, which places the player characters and their house in the place of House Atreides, inheriting Dune from the Harkonnens by decree of the emperor.

The adventure we’re looking at today also places player characters directly in the path of galactic history, presenting a campaign that takes place just before, during, and in the aftermath of Paul Atreides’ takeover of the imperial throne.

 Dune: Fall of the Imperium

Creative Lead Andrew Peregrine
Line Editor/Canon Editor Rachel J. Wilkinson
Writing Richard August, Simon Berman, Jason Brick, Jason Durall, Keith Garrett, Jack Norris, Andrew Peregrine, Dave Semark, Hilary Sklar, Devinder Thiara, Mari Tokuda, Rachel J. Wilkinson
Graphic Design Chris Webb, Leigh Woosey, Jen Mccleary
Art Direction Rocío Martín Pérez
Cover Artist David Benzal
Interior Artwork Artists Amir Zand, Joel Chaim Holtzman, János Tokity, Simone Rizzo, Jakub Kozlowski, Carmen Cornet, Eren Arik, Hans Park, Mikhail Palamarchuk, Mihail Spil-Haufter, Lixin Yin, Susanah Grace, Alexander Guillen Brox, Imad Awan, Louie Maryon, Justin Usher, Jonny Sun, Olivier Hennart, Pat Fix, Avishek Banerjee, Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme, Simone Rizzo
Proofreading Stuart Gorman
Project Management Daniel Lade
Brand Management Joe Lefavi for Genuine Entertainment

Disclaimer

I am not working from a review copy of this product and did not receive a review copy to work from. I have received review copies from Modiphius Entertainment in the past. I have not had the opportunity to play or run this adventure. I do have a familiarity with the 2d20 system, having run and played multiple iterations of the rules.

Layout and Design

I am working from a PDF of the adventure. The adventure is available as a PDF or a physical book. Additionally, there is a Roll20 version of the adventure for sale. The PDF is 146 pages long. The content of those pages breaks down to this:

• Covers–2 pages
• Inside Front Cover Art–1 page
• Company Title Page–1 page
• Product Title Page–1 page
• Credits Page–1 page
• Table of Contents–1 page
• Shuttle Map–1 page
• Map of Arrakeen–1 page
• Modiphius Product Ads–3 pages

There is some glorious artwork in this book, and the design of most of the outfits, vehicles, architecture, etc. match the recent movies. While this book assumes the continuity of the original novels, the licensing is all bound together, meaning they don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to producing artwork. The pages are in a light parchment color, with geometric flourishes under the text. There is artwork throughout, especially depicting notable characters. Each of the chapters starts with a two-page spread of full color art.

The layout varies depending on the purpose of the text. Most of the adventure is in a two-column layout, but background material and overviews are formatted in centered text boxes or single columns that run down the middle of the page. Sidebars are often in the lower right- or left-hand side of the page.

The Judge of the Change

This adventure is the framework for an entire campaign, if you couldn’t glean that from the introduction. The book itself is broken into the following sections:

• Introduction
• Act I: The Gathering Storm
• Act II: Muad’Dib
• Act III: Fall of the Imperium
• Act IV: War Across a Million Worlds
• Adventures in the Era of Muad’Dib

Adventures in the Era of Muad’Dib is a section that details the kind of setting assumptions that should be considered for playing the RPG during the establishment of Paul’s reign. This includes the differences between the chaos and violence of that era, contrasted against the political maneuvering and quick betrayals of the previous era.

Each act of the campaign has its own set of acts, which are the primary adventures that characters will engage with as that leg of the campaign progresses. This means that within all four acts, there are three adventures, each with their own three acts.

While I mentioned the Agents of Dune campaign boxed set above, unlike that product, these adventures assume that the events of the novels happen when and how they are detailed in the source material. There are a few notes on what might happen if the GM and the players want to deviate from the story, but most sections assume that the path of history rolls forward unabated.

Who Are You?

The PCs are playing agents of their own house, managing their interests in light of emerging events. For several parts of the campaign, this means you’ll be dealing with the cascading effects of galactic history, rather than being right next to it. However, there are several places where the adventure narrows back down to canon events so the PCs can be present as witnesses.

There is an interesting sidebar at the beginning of the adventure which I both agree with and think oversimplifies the situation, especially when it’s applied to the players and the decisions they are making. The sidebar mentions that both Paul and the Harkonnens are nobles whose people toil for the profit of their rulers, and that while the Harkonnens are vicious and violent in their tactics, Paul starts a war that kills billions of people. All on board with “Paul isn’t the Good Guy.” But it also frames this as “there are no villains,” which, no, that’s harder to take. Paul isn’t the good guy because of the repercussions of his actions, but it is hard to say that the Harkonnens aren’t villains. I think it’s pretty easy to conceive of a story where there are no heroes, only villains, rather than saying there are no heroes or villains.

Part of why this sidebar exists, however, is to reinforce the concept that making decisions for a House in the Landsraad often means choosing between multiple bad options. If the PCs ally with the Harkonnens for a time, they aren’t suddenly the villains of the story, they may just be doing something very distasteful for them in order to help their house survive. There are several places in the narrative where characters have the option of throwing in with different houses against other houses, which means being allied doesn’t always mean being long term friends or business partners.

As agents of a Landsraad House, there are a combination of missions you can undertake for the betterment of your house, which also happens to give you insight into the greater events unfolding. For example, trying to secure a hidden smuggler’s cache of spice after the Atreides take over Arrakis lets you stumble upon some Harkonnen records that may lead you to the hidden base of operations of a Sardukar agent, and so on.

While the adventure has several places where events unfold at a distance from the events of the novels, there are a few key places where the PCs are funneled back into the main narrative. These include:

• The night House Atreides falls
• The Death of Rabban
• The Death of Leto II
• The sequence of Paul’s ascension to the throne and all the events surrounding it

If you read “The Death of Leto II,” and thought, wait, I don’t want to be there for that, I completely understand. That particular aspect of the adventure kind of underscores some of the problems the adventure has whenever it funnels the PCs back to major canon events. It’s very clear you are pushed into those events to witness them. If you play the adventure as written, you are sent with the Sardukar on their raid of the sietch, and you arrive at the scene just after Leto II has been killed.

In many of the “up close to history” scenes, your characters are rolling to avoid getting in anyone’s way and hoping to pick up some things beneficial to your house on the periphery of bigger events. One exception to this is the death of Rabban. The PCs have several paths to this point, but almost all of them involve someone wanting them to kill Rabban in the lead up to the most tumultuous events preceding Paul’s ascension.

This would be a really neat, “that was your characters!” moment, except there are still some heavy handed sections where his location is a bait and switch, so you must encounter Feyd, and you can’t kill Rabban all by yourselves, Gurney Halleck will show up and either try to do it before you, or help you out.

The Wide-Open Galaxy

Act II is especially open compared to the rest of the adventure. Your characters are negotiating for spice as Harkonnen production slows. You chase spies on a ski resort planet. You skulk around backwaters looking for blackmail information and encrypted documents. In one of my favorite moments in the adventure, your characters navigate a night of betrayal that is both thematically calling back to the attack on House Atreides, but both more subtle and distinct. It’s one of those places where it really feels like the adventure delivers you a very “Dune” experience without just using canon Dune events.

Act IV is strange. While it deals with events we know happened, broadly, i.e. Paul’s crusade ravaging worlds that failed to show their loyalty, the places where these adventures take place generally don’t have a lot of canon surrounding them, meaning that the PCs actions can have greater effect. The downside is that in many cases, the reason they are in the path of these events is very thin. In several cases, Paul issues an imperial decree for the PCs to go to a place, where they may work against his agents, and the next time they see Paul, “he sees something in their future that keeps him from acting against them,” and then they can go somewhere else and either discreetly or overtly defy him.

The culmination of the entire adventure/campaign is that a House that has long been associated with the PCs’ House is accused of treason. The PCs can find out what is going on, disassociate themselves from their allies or exonerate them, and determine who to screw over and who to align themselves with to keep one of Paul’s lieutenants from declaring their House as an enemy of the throne.

Mechanical Resolution

An aspect of the adventure that I really enjoy is that it leans into the 2d20 concept of creating traits. If you aren’t familiar with traits in a 2d20 game (which have slightly different names depending on the 2d20 game in question), they function in a manner similar to Fate aspects. They are a broad description of something that is true. Depending on the narrative, traits either grant narrative permission to do something that wouldn’t be possible if the trait weren’t active, or it adds or subtracts from the difficulty of a task if it is relevant to that task.

Depending on how the PCs resolve different scenes in the adventure, they may acquire different traits, which will be available for use either by the PCs or the GM if they are still active. For example, in many cases, PCs that ally with a house will gain a trait that denotes that they are “Ally of House X,” and any time that’s relevant, it might make a check either more or less difficult. They may also gain traits that reflect their reputation; for example, if they resolve a scene by hiding, they may get a “Cowardice” trait, which might come into play whenever dealing with characters that are proud of their martial accomplishments.

There are also events that remove traits. For example, early in the adventure, it’s a lot easier for the PCs to pick up the “Ally to House Harkonnen” trait, which they may end up shedding if, later in the adventure, they advocate for the emperor to strip them of their rights to Arrakis.

Like Star Trek Adventures, Dune: Adventures in the Imperium makes provisions for a player running characters other than their primary character, usually in circumstances where the PCs wouldn’t want to personally be involved in the activities they are directing. This is separate from, but adjacent to, Architect play, where PCs can say they are using resources from a distance to manipulate events, making checks for broad actions they are taking, to influence events.

For example, if a character has troops as one of their resources, and there have been smugglers raiding their holdings, they could use Architect mode to send troops to take care of the smugglers without ever going to that location, rolling to see how well their orders are carried out versus the difficulty of the outcome they want. The downside to Architect play being that it’s hard to get specific granular results. In the example above, you might be able to get rid of the smugglers, but the GM may tell you that unless you show up yourself, you can’t expect your troops to capture a smuggler alive for interrogation.

There are a few places in the adventure where broader goals are mentioned as something the PCs might attempt with Architect mode, usually in the periphery of events that surround the political maneuvering in Act II. There are also a few brief mentions of using supporting characters during certain events, especially if the player character in question isn’t a particularly martial specimen, and they tackle a mission like killing Rabban.

Because these are excellent tools, I wish the adventure had spent more time expanding how they could be used to greater effect in various scenes. While I don’t think any scene where the PCs have most of their agency removed is going to be fun to sit through, I could see several of the “you must go this direction” encounters being easier to swallow if those scenes were expressly meant to be carried out by secondary character operatives. I suspect that this wasn’t done in part because the adventure wants your primary PCs to be present at these major events, not just a character you are playing.

Having a few lines referencing, “they could get X, likely through Architect play,” isn’t nearly as satisfying as a more detailed list of resources or events that the PCs could undertake that had a direct effect on the narrative and the position of their house in each act.

Aftermath

When I first saw there was a section on Adventures in the Era of Muad’Dib, I was thinking something along the lines of the one-page mission briefs from Star Trek Adventures. This is, more precisely, tools and mechanics available to reflect the differences in the galaxy after Paul’s ascension to the throne and the spread of his religion. It introduces the faction template for the Qizarate, as well as six new talents that are either tied to that faction or involve interaction with Paul directly.

While there aren’t “mission brief” style adventures, there are sections on what resistance to the throne looks like in this era, some of the espionage that might be going on, and a few adventure seeds surrounding interacting with Paul, the adherents of his faith, and the changing allegiances in the Imperium. These are generally short, one paragraph long descriptions.

 I feel like you’re either going to have some frustrating moments as written, or you’re going to be reworking some key scenes so that the PCs have actual agency in those moments 

The Mystery of Life Isn’t a Problem to Solve, But A Reality to Experience

I really appreciate the ambition of this adventure. It really shines in Act II, and a bit in Act IV, where the PCs have lots of options available to them, and the main thing that is determined by canon are the stakes they are navigating. I absolutely love the Night of Slow blades section of the adventure, because it hits that sweet spot of “this is tailored for your PCs” and “this feels like exactly what would happen in the novels.” There are also some other scenes across various acts that shine. While not everyone may take the road that leads to this, I really liked the details of negotiating with Baron Harkonnen, as well as the scenes where the PCs can debate with other agents of the Landsraad houses in court with the emperor.

An Animal Caught in A Trap Will Gnaw Off Its Own Leg to Escape. What Will You Do?

I wish that when the adventure pushes the PCs into “witness” mode, there was more for them to do than observe and make a few checks to see if they pick up a new trait or asset for themselves or their house. There are some brushes with canon events early on that feel especially frustrating. You may get into a fight with Rabban the night of the Atreides attack, but he’s got plot armor. You might see Jessica and Paul being herded onto an ornithopter in the distance, but you’re too far away to do anything about it. The absolute worse example of this is being present for Leto II’s death. I don’t expect the adventure to give you the opportunity to stop this from happening–it’s a pretty pivotal story beat. But I don’t know that my desire to witness the noteworthy events of Dune included helplessly traveling with the people that murder Paul’s infant son.

Tenuous Recommendation–The product has positive aspects, but buyers may want to make sure the positive aspects align with their tastes before moving this up their list of what to purchase next.

I don’t want to be too brutal. I think that if you are a fan of Dune (and I’m not sure why you would be buying Dune RPG material if you weren’t) you will find some use for this adventure. On the other hand, I feel like you’re either going to have some frustrating moments as written, or you’re going to be reworking some key scenes so that the PCs have actual agency in those moments. That’s a shame, because there are some wonderful moments in the adventure that tie the PCs and their house to events with a little more room to breathe, that would be great to see attached to an adventure that didn’t funnel you back into your front row seats for a show you can’t really affect.

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Ang, Chris and Josh chat about mixing up genres in our RPGs and as a result touch on what genre is, and why we can and should mash it all up together!

Links:

D&D Lego!

The Nebula Awards

Daggerheart Playtest

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We are all familiar with the trope of a regular gaming group. You know, the one who meets on regular days in the regular gaming location. And while the particularities of the imagined group differ, the factors of time and space stay constant, but so too does the cast. Although we all know how wonderful a regular gaming group can be, I am here to suggest that there’s several benefits of regularly shifting up the cast around your gaming table as well. I will discuss the pros of this, and of course mention some of the cons while suggesting how they can be remedied or at least reduced. I might even suggest that shifting up your regular gaming group will just mean you’ll have a regular gaming circle, but that’s getting ahead of myself. I’ll discuss the benefits of not having a regular group first.

Scheduling

People’s lives change, along with their calendars, interests and priorities, and unfortunately also health and postal codes. Having a steady group is all well and good, but sometimes scheduling games will take a lot of effort. For a lot of us that’s where the real issue of burnout comes from, with a tedious and complicated scheduling matrix, and the accompanying cancellations. I find that it’s much easier to fit people to dates I’m available instead of finding people first and then looking at the calendars. I’d rather play shorter campaigns for six months or so, than risk having campaigns end in scheduling limbo, due to peoples changing lives and priorities. It’s much easier to find a date that works for all if the group is brought together on the same premise and not just out of habit. If everyone assembled for your Weird Western-game is really wanting to play weird western and have all cleared the same date in the week, you are more certain that they will attend game nights than if they’re just your friends, have other hobbies and are really just wanting you all to go back to playing a Fantasy or a Cyberpunk game again. Sure, people will still have emergencies, or just family or work commitments, but if you have a robust group bound together on a mission, you might at least get to finish the campaign together, at the very least experience a somewhat satisfactory ending, even if things keep happening. Oh, and as a bonus, you also have at least one friend who is eagerly awaiting the start of the next Fantasy or Cyberpunk campaign!

Different Experiences

While monogamy has its virtues, I find that gaming with a richer and more varied crowd brings a lot of benefits to myself, the other individuals and the group as a whole, while also benefiting a larger circle of people. We avoid the rut that a steady group will sometimes attain, and variations in cast give different players the chance to try out different roles/functions/classes that some players tend to monopolize. Like the players who will “always” play “The Face” character, but the GM knows that one of the shyer players has talked about playing one for a long time. This might also include the one who will always play the lone magical talent or the baddest of the baddest combatant as well. Also, I believe new blood opens up for new perspectives, ideas and challenges, and that the table dynamics won’t get stale. New players also mean new approaches, new words and maybe something different that people can add to their repertoire. This goes double if your gaming table carousel includes different GMs as well as players, and I’ll add that your great tricks will reach more roleplayers as well.

Polygamery

Not all players will play all types of games and genres, and my experience is that some groups tend to be quite selective in what they enjoy to play. Not only can you finally play that heart-(and other body parts-)wrenching game of Monsterhearts, but you can do it without the sighs of those who would rather rob the Megacorps of Night City or kill the inhabitants of the Caverns of Chaos and take their stuff. Changing up your groups opens up for bringing your Sun Tzus and butt-kickers to one game and your Elisabeth Bennets to another; for optimization of enjoyment. A wrong player might weaken the right game, but the synergies of players who truly “sing” together is a beautiful experience. Playing lots of different games means that you might even get your non-roleplaying friends to attend, because they’re so into the Russian Women’s Piloting World War II efforts or Dinosaur Princesses, bringing more people into our lovely hobby and maybe having even more intimate friendships?

Network

If you treat your table or living room as a carousel, I believe it will in time give you access to more players, multiple GMs for those burnout periods, and, as mentioned, a roster for different play experiences. A larger pool also means that your games will be less vulnerable to people relocating or otherwise becoming unavailable for play, and if you game online you might meet those friends at conventions and maybe even get to do some couch surfing? I recently had a friend lend me a proper bed and feline company for a faraway convention. Since we had experience gaming online together, I was also certain their games would give me some good gaming experiences. While I believe the benefits to yourself are clear, I also believe you’ll be doing other people a favor, introducing them both to other people and other games, and perhaps even other playstyles than they’re used to. Maybe you can help spawn new groups as well as new friendships?

Note: Friendships will endure even if a game is paused! Playing with someone else doesn’t mean you can’t do other stuff or even play one-shots with friends, and I also believe that you don’t need to game with all your gaming friends, especially if your playstyles and game interests don’t really match up that well.

Cons

Changing up the group all the time means regularly (re)establishing group lingo, forming-storming-and-norming-before-performing (optimally) and the flip-side of the new perspectives and shaking up the dynamics-coin. Safety? Not everyone will be comfortable meeting new people at their places or even bringing them home, and just needing to go to another neighbourhood or taking another bus route might be an issue, even if the group is safe itself. There’s also the dreaded FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), which I myself consider an old friend. I can honestly say that not only will it get better, but you’ll learn to be happy when your friends get to play, even when it’s without you. I understand that it can be difficult, especially if you’re not actively gaming yourself at the time. Sometimes it’s really easy to think that you’re being excluded, even though your friends have a full gaming table of people who are much more interested in the particular genre/game than you, but you’ll recognize that the sting of perception isn’t real. If you regularly change up the makeup of your own gaming table, it’s easier to understand that this is the case when you yourself aren’t asked first to that genre you don’t really like. In time you’ll learn to be happy when your friends get to play, even if you yourself are devoid of game time; because you know that soon your big roster of gaming buddies will invite you. Sometimes you and your best friend play parallel games that aren’t for each other, but that doesn’t mean you can’t meet up and talk about the different games and revel in your friend’s happiness of being in a game you wouldn’t have liked anyway.

Conclusion

I truly believe that treating your gaming table as a carousel that regulates its cast to the different experiences, both in number of players and temperament suited to different gaming experiences, will benefit both you and the other players. Maybe someone will even take up the GM mantle, since they can’t rely on you always bringing them along for the ride? Yes, it’s easier to enforce this idea if you’re always the GM, but it’s not like you couldn’t invite different GMs to GM different games either. I guess a lot of GMs would be happy to not have to deal with scheduling, and to be assured of enthusiastic and consenting players for that particular game. I also believe that if it is known that you regularly change up the cast around your table people will make more of an effort when they’re there, and others might even want to pursue a chair around your table, by inviting you to their game first.

Even though I advocate changing the cast around everyone’s gaming tables, I’ll gladly admit that my three current groups are all talking about doing another campaign after our current one ends. So am I hypocritical? Well, probably, but in this case I find it a natural development of having played with a lot of different people. You get the aforementioned roster, and you will naturally gravitate to players who like games you like and want to play more with them, and vice versa. Not only that, but you’ll also get to learn player skills, table habits and GM techniques from a lot of people, enabling yourself to become a really popular and crafty GM or player. Every now and then someone’s other life elements will leave them out of a campaign or two, or their interest just isn’t there for a project, and that’s when you’ll be happy for your big roster.

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Face to face, out in the heat, hanging tough, staying hungry…

                                                                                                                                             — Survivor, “Eye of the Tiger”

In a proud GM Dad moment, my eldest daughter just ran her first RPG session as a Game Master! I let her be, but stayed close enough to answer the occasional question, and by all accounts and an enthusiastic reception from her players she did a great job!

While preparing for her first session, she asked me a lot of questions. I answered them as best I could and thought that incorporating that advice into a single primer might help. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to finish this before she started running, but I thought I’d finish it anyway and put it here in the hopes that someone reading this might find it useful.

In terms of background, I’m coming at this from the POV of a Call of Cthulhu Keeper (GM), as that is what my daughter was running. Thus, my headspace was focused on investigative adventures, but I’ve tried to make the advice universally applicable.

So, without further ado…

Trust your group.

This is a big one and I think should be stated first. Unless you are running a convention game, you are probably playing with your friends, friends who understand that this is your first time taking the chair. They know that it’s a big responsibility and they’ll be willing to cut you a lot of slack. They’re happy that you’re willing to run a game for them. So, relax and don’t worry about being judged!

Note that this holds true for convention games, too. Believe it or not, many attendees who join convention games are home GMs who are happy to be players for a while. In any event, most of your players are getting used to playing with each other as much as you, so don’t think that a quiet table is an unhappy table. Everyone needs a little time to feel things out.

Expect to make mistakes.

You’re going to make mistakes, probably lots of them. But that’s okay. As a new GM, you’ve got a lot to keep track of and a responsibility to guide the session. You’re going to get tripped up here and there. Your players know that, and they’ll be fine with it. Again, they’re happy that you’re trying your hand at running!

And here’s a dirty little secret (or not so secret): we veteran GMs make mistakes too! The best advice I can give is not to hide it when you mess up. Nothing eases the stress on you like admitting that you made a mistake. If it’s something that didn’t derail the adventure, then just note the mistake and keep going. If it adversely affected the players, then compensate them and move on.

Be fair in your rulings.

While your players are going to give you their trust, it is up to you to keep it. A good way to do that is to be fair in your rulings. Note that “rulings” aren’t “rules,” they are how you run the game and apply the rules. As long as your decisions feel rational and you apply your rulings fairly, you should maintain the trust of your group.

It’s okay to take advice from your players regarding rules or rulings, but don’t let things get bogged down if a quick ruling keeps things moving. Ultimately, the rules are simply there to help you make decisions. Just make a decision for now and look up the rule after the session. You can apply the rule in the future.

Only appeal to chance when it matters.

Players generally want their characters to be competent. They don’t want to create a martial arts expert that gets easily clubbed unconscious by a purse-wielding senior or a scientist that doesn’t know basic chemistry. An easy way to do this is to simply assume competence when the act ultimately doesn’t matter or when the task seems too easy to fail. On the flip side, you can also say “no” when a character tries to do something that is obviously beyond their capabilities.

This is especially important if you’re running an investigative adventure. If your characters are investigating a crime scene, then they should be able to find any obvious clues as well as clues that they would know to look for. Nothing kills an adventure dead like the players not being able to follow leads because their character missed a skill roll to find a necessary piece of evidence!

There may be times when you’ll want the players to roll but you also need them to succeed. Keep in mind that you don’t have to make the roll a pass-fail test. It may be that if they fail, then they still succeed but draw some sort of complication. For example, if a character fails a roll on an internet search, then you may rule that they found the information only after wasting all night surfing and now they’re exhausted the next day.

Roll in the open.

This one isn’t truly necessary, as there is a long tradition of GMs rolling dice behind screens, but rolling in the open does two things. First, it fosters trust between you and your players that you are keeping things fair. Second, if you know that you’ll be rolling in the open, then you’ll also make sure that you’re only calling for rolls when you can accept the result. If you can’t, then why are you leaving it to chance?

Know the basic beats of your adventure.

Hopefully, you’ve done your prep work on your adventure. If you designed it yourself, then you’ve already internalized it. If you are using an adventure that you didn’t create, then you’ll want to read it at least twice (three is better!).

After reading the adventure, make a quick flowchart that follows the basic beats of the adventure and note where player choice matters. This flowchart doesn’t have to be very detailed, just enough to remind you of where the adventure is heading and how to guide the players back if they take their characters too far afield.

If the players need to meet a key NPC, find a crucial clue, or otherwise need a McGuffin to get to the next part of the adventure, then you’ll want to note that on the flowchart as well. That way, the flowchart will remind you of the important things you need to introduce along the way.

Keep things moving…

One of the worst things that you can do as a GM, new or veteran, is to allow the players to be stumped for too long. Sometimes what is obvious to you isn’t obvious to them, or they’ve simply discarded a clue that’s important because it doesn’t fit their theories. This can lead to unnecessary frustration.

Don’t be afraid to offer guidance. Sometimes, you can simply remind them of what they’ve found or offer suggestions to follow leads. A gentle reminder that they never visited the business on the matchbook they found, or they never thought to check the hills for the goblin encampment may be enough to get them moving without feeling like you handed it to them.

Also, don’t be afraid to end an encounter early if the conclusion is obvious. If the player characters are wiping the floor with kobolds, then you can simply say that they’ve finished them off without having to waste another 15 minutes. If an NPC isn’t going to give the players the information they want, then you don’t need to wait 10 minutes while the players keep asking questions.

…But don’t railroad.

If you’ve played RPGs for any length of time, then you’ve probably heard about the dreaded “railroad.” Simply put, railroading is whenever you take agency away from the players in situations where they believe that they should have agency. If the players are going to follow the adventure, it should be because it feels logical, or at least rational, for them to do so.

A good way to counter this is to always offer an open-ended option whenever you offer suggestions. “So, do you want to go to the business on the matchbook, follow up on Mr. Tanner’s interrogation, or do something else?” reminds the players of leads they haven’t followed but also tells them that you’re willing to go with whatever they decide.

Simplify the rules and internalize them.

Note that while I think most GMs get intimidated by the rules, I’ve made rules the lowest on the list of priorities. That’s because rules are the responsibility of everyone around the table, especially given that most out-of-game arguments during play tend to be about rules.

You don’t need to commit an entire rulebook to memory, but you should internalize the basic mechanic. Don’t worry about side cases. You can always make rulings until you’re more familiar with those rules. Just remember that point above about being fair!

In Dungeons & Dragons, for example, most tests involve rolling a d20 and adding modifiers to meet or exceed a target number. That, along with granting advantage or disadvantage, is enough for you to run a session with little trouble.

You’re supposed to be having fun, too!

This is not so much a guideline but a reminder. As a GM, you aren’t supposed to sacrifice fun; you are simply trading one type of fun for another. You get to see all the behind-the-scenes plotting, enjoy having the players interact with your adventure and make creative (and sometimes bone-headed!) decisions, play a bunch of NPCs, and overall control the flow of the adventure. It can be a blast!

Your players have a responsibility to ensure that you’re having fun, too. While there will certainly be times that a player doesn’t agree with you, they should respect your ultimate decisions. If things become too aggravating or frustrating, then it’s better to take a break or even shut down a campaign until those issues are resolved.

Wrapping Up

While taking the GM Chair can seem intimidating and even overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be. Hopefully, the advice above is helpful in showing you that it’s possible to ease into GMing and, hopefully, lead to your guiding friends through many new adventures!

And as a final (and most important) reminder, GMing is not something to be tolerated, it is meant to be enjoyed!

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I’ve reviewed so many other things, and I feel like I’ve been missing a fundamental item in all of this. It’s key to understanding all of my other reviews. Today, I’m going to review the process of reviewing.

I’ve literally been reviewing things from the time I was born. I remember my siblings showing me Land of the Lost, and when I saw the Sleestak for the first time, I said nope. My very first review, and a lot more succinct than I would become once I had a better vocabulary.

Disclaimer

I was not given permission to discuss the process of reviewing the review process. I have had many opinions over the years. I have not had the opportunity to see if all of my opinions are correct, although I strongly suspect they are.

Credits

Current Human Beings Varies
Popularized Reviews as Entertainment in and of Themselves Siskel and Ebert
The Internet Al Gore
The QWERTY Keyboard Christopher Latham Sholes
Modern Internet Culture Satan, probably

Popular Review Formats

Human beings review things all the time. One of the newest trends popularized by the internet is Extreme Vibes. In this technique, when you see something you like, especially if someone else doesn’t like it, you can classify it as the Best Thing Ever. Literally, it can’t be the Best Thing Ever if anything else is the Best Thing Ever, but this technique doesn’t really hinge on nuance.

There is an additional aspect to Extreme Vibes, and that is The Absolute Worst. The process goes like this:

• You dislike something
• Someone else likes it
• You realize they are wrong
• You rate it the The Absolute Worst

As with The Best Thing Ever, it is not literally possible to be The Absolute Worst. In addition to the reasons listed for The Best Thing Ever, i.e. if there is another Absolute Worst, there cannot be another Absolute Worst, so previous reviews are immediately invalidated, the Absolute Worst has another reason it remains an imprecise measure. Human beings are extremely talented at coming up with additional things that are worse than the last thing they did.

While this form of review started in the simple format of message board posts and social media responses, it has matured much like more traditional forms of review. In a move reminiscent of the sudden placement of television reviews on every news program in the 1980s, various forms of new media blossom with Extreme Vibes in video format, either in long form, as the most venerable YouTubers work with, or the more succinct micro Extreme Vibes videos that can be seen on Tik Tok.

Shooting Stars

This technique only works within the framework of another review process, specifically sites that allow you to rate a product by using symbols, often stars, but sometimes more esoteric symbols, like cupcakes, circles, or rhombuses. This is an extremely impressionist technique, even when compared to the Extreme Vibes method. The key isn’t that you need to express even your slightest tendencies as extreme antipathy or sympathy.

The real key to the Shooting Stars technique is that you put people in mind of what a review should look like, then you challenge them to engage with the review and it’s connection to the product in question in a process not unlike art appreciation. The product isn’t what’s making you feel something, the review is!

You may want an example of this. Some of the most masterful of these reviews include the following:

• Rating a product with one star, because you love it, but UPS destroyed the box, leaving you to contemplate if an author should have a star rating that incorporates frustration with a shopping company.
• Using absolute language while not engaging with either side of a scale that can measure extremes. Examples include a two star rating that cites a product as the worst thing the reviewer has encountered, or a four out of five star review that is “the best.” This leaves you contemplating the nature of extremes, and the connection between objective math and creativity.
• Writing a review that contains a long anecdote from the reviewer’s personal life, which only near the end tangentially touches on the actual merits of the item in question, or its lack of merits. This is a lesson in understanding that things need to be taken as a whole, rather than in discrete parts.

None of this should be confused with the Transcendent Narrative Review, which utilizes the review space to tell an epic story for which movie rights should be secured. The secret of the Transcendent Narrative Review is that it isn’t actually a review, but a separate artform that uses the review as its form.

Aggressive Aggregating

Probably the easiest genre of reviewing for anyone to get into. This involves logging in to a review aggregation site and clicking on a number. This is technically an advanced version of Extreme Vibes, and some reviewologists, instead of categorizing this as its own type of review, actually consider this Advanced Extreme Vibes.

I would still maintain this is a separate form of review, because in addition to the above, there is an added element of watching the aggregation percentage trending toward the direction you indicated. There is a certain anonymity to this form of reviewing that can really let someone free their inner monster. Because the key is to see the communal percentage go up or down, often reviewers in this genre will multitask by creating multiple logins for the same aggregate site, in order to express their opinions with creative resonance.

Positives

Honestly, reviewing is probably a necessary function of human beings. Without being able to express that we really do or don’t like something, reviewologists have posited that our heads would explode. They even point to some medieval tapestries that indicate peasants with exploding heads, watching the king’s favorite puppet show. It’s easy to extrapolate that their ability to provide reviews was impeded. So the big benefit to various review techniques is to keep our heads from exploding.

Negatives

Long term review work results in an effect similar to the effects that can be observed when living tissue is exposed to cosmic rays. Not the cool cosmic rays that grant superpowers, but the cosmic rays that start to melt flesh. Participating in Extreme Vibes for too long, for example, sometimes allows the reviewer’s head to explode anyway, because their opinion is forming faster than the reviewer can form words. There is also the problem of extreme isolation and listlessness for reviewers that operate in these environments and don’t use a more extreme medium like Extreme Vibes or Aggressive Aggregating, because all of the oxygen tends to be sucked out of the conversation as both extreme ends of the spectrum garner all attention.

Not Recommended–There isn’t much in this product gods forsaken process that convinces me to tell others to pick it up.

This quote doesn’t exist anywhere in the article you are reading. On one hand, that may be kind of confusing, but if you look at it this way, you’re getting new content rather than just seeing part of the article again, but bigger.

Never, ever start reviewing things. It slowly, or not so slowly, eats away at your mental health. I was normal before I started this job. Okay, that’s a lie. I never used to lie before I got this job. I’m lying about that. But it definitely changed me.

Every time you read through a product and see the love and care that went into it, and you recognize the craft employed in its creation, and you see someone say, “it’s junk,” you start to wonder if you were reading text that was only visible to you. Then you start to think, maybe it was only visible to me.

Every time you attempt to make a joke about some form of RPG that no one would ever attempt to create, some actual game arrives on the scene, either spectacularly daring the world to deny it’s genius or astounding you with the audacity to string together a mass of concepts, themes, and procedures in some simulationist echo of Frankenstein’s monster, threatening to hunt down and kill your family if you don’t make the perfect review mate for the game.

I watched SEO glitter in the dark near the Google Search Bar. All those reviews will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to join a new social media platform.

End of Line.

Editor’s Note: Jared, our review gnome, was asked to find a way to write a parody of an RPG without referencing any existing RPG properties or citing any similarities with them. Instead of that article, this was sent to us via a burner e-mail account. Jared has not been seen for the last two weeks, although the authorities believe they have a strong lead to his whereabouts.

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Planning in RPGs has always been a problem. On one hand, it’s often necessary for a group of players to plan out something their characters are trying to accomplish. On the other, most groups are not adept at planning, and even if they were, the activity is never that exciting at the table – worse if you are the GM who is more of a spectator. All of this is worse if you are under any kind of time constraint, like running a one-shot. 

That is the problem I was having. In a few weeks, my high school gaming group is having a reunion, and we wanted to play some games. One of our group’s main games was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Rather than run TMNT, I offered Mutants in the Now, which I think is a better overall game. It will be a one-shot, and likely time bound to 4-6 hours. The scenario I wanted was a raid on an island of the evil genius Dr. Feral. But planning…

Other games have done a good job of designing around planning, but Mutants in the Now does not have any direct planning rules. So I started to think, what if we didn’t plan everything but the group just made some choices? That is when I got the idea for Plan by Mad Libs. So let’s talk about it. 

What are Mad Libs?

A Mad Lib is a word game where one player asks for certain words – a noun, a verb, etc – with little or no context. The words are plugged into pre-written text. After all the words have been collected, the person reads the text, which often results in a silly, but entertaining narrative. For more info see:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Libs
• https://www.madlibs.com/

What is a Plan?

A plan is defined as a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something. There is an objective, and there are the steps to achieve that objective. Typically when this is done in RPGs the group knows or decides the objective, and then works to figure out the steps. This often results in iterative discussions as details that are discussed prompt a new discussion about older details. It can be time-consuming, frustrating, and boring. 

Plan By Mad Libs

The idea is to use the Mad Lib format to streamline planning so that we can quickly define the plan and move on to its execution, where the characters are taking action. 

To do this, I needed to take some of the agency from the players, for the sake of time. That is, I needed to come up with the pre-written text – the plan for how the characters would raid the island. I did this using a simple story framework for a typical raid kind of story. The plan would need info on infiltration, a diversion, achieving the objective, and exfiltration from the island. 

The blanks could then be the WHO and in some cases the HOW. Those choices could be left to the players so that they could customize the framework and make the plan theirs. 

Here is an example of how I used the WHO to define the infiltration to the island:

We first have to get onto Dr. Feral’s island. NAME will smuggle themselves aboard Kris Pierce’s yacht in Miami, and arrive on the island at the docks. At the same time, NAME and NAME will take a private flight out of Ft. Lauderdale and will parachute onto the southeast grasslands with our backup gear. NAME got a job as a bodyguard for Linda Davenport and will arrive on the island as part of her entourage, and will be at the arena. 

Here is an example of how I used the HOW for the diversion:

While that is going on, WHO will go to the CHOOSE (DOCKS, AIRSTRIP, POWER STATION) to cause a diversion by BLANK (ACTION or METHOD). 

Implementing the Plan By Mad Libs

The full plan is written as if one of the characters is going over the plan with the rest of the group (this was highly inspired by a scene from the A-Team movie). The players will fill out the Mad Lib plan and then one of them will read it back to the group. As soon as it’s read, we can jump right into playing.

Advantages of Planning by Mad Libs

There are a few advantages to this. The first is that it should be quick. Filling in the blanks won’t take long and we should be up and running quickly. Second, the plan is written out and on the table while we play. There is little chance people will forget the plan with it there on the table. Third, I can prep for the plan, which means that I can add some nice mechanical details that I might miss if I was ad-libbing based on a plan made at the table. Fourth, I can roughly manage the duration of the game based on the size of the plan I write.

Kind of Sounds Like A Railroad

Not really. Of course, there will be twists in the plan – some from me and others through the actions of the characters – and that I will manage while we play. The players can abandon the plan as soon as we start, or they can follow it all the way through. Both work.

The goal of the Mad Lib plan wasn’t to control the whole adventure, it was to minimize planning and get into the execution of the plan. The Mad Lib plan accomplishes that goal. 

One-Shots vs. Campaigns

For sure, this idea works great for one-shots, but could it work for a campaign? I think so, if the players were to buy into the concept. Hijacking a bit of agency in a one-shot is not that big of a deal, but in a campaign it could be more of a complex topic. 

I think it would work in a campaign where planning was not the norm, where the core loop of the game is something other than planning and for a specific story there needs to be a plan, and you use the Mad Libs format to streamline things so that the story goes smoothly. For instance, I would not use this for a Night’s Black Agents op, but I might use it for a one-off supers heist in the Marvel Multiverse game. 

Anything But Planning

Planning is not a fun activity in most RPGs. There are a lot of ways modern designers are trying to reduce or remove planning from games, all for the better. That said, there are plenty of games out there that need a design for minimizing planning. For those games, something like a Mad Lib plan can help.

I hope that this Mad Lib plan will help my table come up with an interesting and entertaining plan that unfolds into an exciting session. 

How do you manage planning at your table? Would you try a Mad Lib plan?

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Ang, Jared, and JT get together on the mics to talk about all the ins and outs of taking over the GMing duties in an existing group. Links: Pathfinder Mini-Dungeon Tome D&D 5e Mini-Dungeon Tome Coriolis: The Great Dark Kickstarter Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern Read more »

It’s become a bit of a meme for people to declare characters from different genres to be “magical girls.” Prince Adam lives his life, during the day, as an unassuming royal heir that hasn’t quite grown up enough to assume his full responsibilities, but when he holds his sword aloft and says “by the power of Grayskull,” he transforms into a big buff dude that can punch holes in tanks. He’s even got a talking cat.

But a lot of those memes assume that the concept of the magical girl is really about Sailor Moon style stories. You have young women living a normal life at school, with normal student problems, who are also superheroes that need to transform into their superhero persona and save the world. But the magical girl genre is broader than those tropes. In broader terms, the magical girl genre is about someone who has magical powers that aren’t common in the society they live in, dealing with the dual nature of being separate from the world they live in, while also living in it.

Two of the earliest magical girl creators in Japan, Mitsuteru Yokoyama and Fujio Akatsuka, have cited the American sitcom Bewitched as an inspiration. While I have watched many magical girl anime stories, I grew up watching Bewitched, so this makes a lot of things click for me. Samantha is a woman with magical powers. She comes from a culture that can’t be revealed to the contemporary American culture to which her husband belongs. She had to deal with complications in her mundane life, as well as using her powers to deal with the complications that arise from her connection to a magical other world.

Understanding that underlying concept of being an outsider who would be less conflicted if you could be what you are, all the time, and juggling the mundane complications that everyone in your position in society needs to deal with, along with additional complications that come with being who you really are, is really important to understanding the game we’re looking at today, Girl by Moonlight.

Disclaimer

I did not receive a review copy of Girl by Moonlight, and I was a backer of the crowdfunding campaign for the game. I have not had the opportunity to play the game, although I do have experience both playing and running Forged in the Dark games, the engine on which the game is built. I have played and run other magical girl RPGs, though, so I have that going for me.

 Girl by Moonlight

Publisher Evil Hat
Author Andrew Gillis
Editors Daniel Wood, Jenn Martin
Proofreader Jenn Martin
Cover Artists Lorne Colt, Kelsey Phillips
Design Consultant Luke Jordan
Indexer Sadie Neat
Art Director Trivia Fox
Interior Artists Carly A-F, Lonnie Garcia, Kelsey Phillips, Zak Goggins, Simon Sweetman, Raven Warner, Jabari Weathers
Sensitivity Readers Jess Meier, Takuma Okada
Layout & Graphic Design John Harper, Fred Hicks
Playtesters Allison Arth, Andi Carrison, Ash Mcallan, Emily Mcallan, John Harper, Luke Jordan, Melody Watson, Nadja Otikor, Violet Miller

Girl by Moonlight Format Power, Mark Up!

This review is based on both the physical copy of Girl by Moonlight, and the PDF version of the product. The physical copy I received is the limited edition cover, because I’m extremely weak against the powers of FOMO.

If you have any of the other Evil Hat Forged in the Dark games, the physical book matches the digest hardcover format of the other games they have released, like Blades in the Dark, Scum and Villainy, and Band of Blades. This also has the matte finish cover that those books have. The pages are sturdy, glossy, and hold the colors in a vibrant manner. The end papers display a repeating pattern of the symbols that appear in the game, in purple, blue, green, and dark pink.

The PDF and the book are 226 pages long. This includes a title page, a publication page, a two-page table of contents, a two-page index, a three-page summary of game rules, and a page of author bios. The PDF includes an image of the limited edition cover in addition to the standard cover.

The book itself has bold headers, many bullet points, it’s “side bars” are actually color bands that introduce their topics in the center of the page, and the layout is in single column format. I love lots of different book formats and flourishes, but I don’t think Evil Hat gets enough credit for maintaining very clear, uncluttered formatting that still looks very inviting and attractive. They make books that bridge the gap between bold, clear formatting, and stylish presentation, better than about anyone else. Girl by Moonlight is no exception.

The Magical Girl Power Source: Forged in the Dark

When Blades in the Dark introduced the Forged in the Dark engine to RPG games, it was built to portray heist-based action, where the story follows a predictable pattern that moves from gathering information, performing missions, dealing with consequences, and working on long term projects. While this makes sense for games about mercenaries trying to survive the winter, striving against an enemy force, or space pirates trying to get rich while dodging the authorities and avoiding political entanglements, it may not seem to be the most natural engine for magical girls.

Remember up in the introduction when I mentioned the expanded concept of magical girls that goes beyond the superhero style magical girl stories? This game uses the more structured, procedural format of the Forged in the Dark engine to make sure that characters think about each aspect of what the stories they are telling are touching upon. Right away in Girl by Moonlight, the book introduces the thesis of this game. Magical Girls, in this instance, are symbolic of people that belong to a marginalized community, drawing the most direct inspiration from the marginalization LBGTQIA+ people experience. If the only version of magical girls you have been exposed to has been the 90s version of Sailor Moon introduced in the United States, you may not realize exactly how apt it is to use the Magical Girl genre in this way.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about and want a quick course, go google Sailor Neptune, Sailor Uranus, or the Amazon Trio, especially if you’ve only encountered 90s Sailor Moon. Then come back. Is it clearer now? Okay, let’s get back to it.

It’s also probably important to point out that “magical girls” in this game aren’t limited to people whose gender identity is female. The genre leans towards portraying women protagonists, but includes characters that have a male gender identity, or do not conform to a gender binary. The term “magical girl,” however, does help to remind us that the default protagonist in these stories isn’t a straight cis male.

The structured nature of the Forged in the Dark engine makes it very clear how each aspect of gameplay contributes to the narrative of marginalized people living in a world that doesn’t accept them, while not being able to ignore the aspects of themselves that aren’t accepted. The phases of play in this game are:

• Obligation
• Downtime
• Mission
• Fallout

Each of these phases will look different depending on the series framework that the group agrees to use, but in general, this means that the characters will need to deal with what the mundane world expects them to do, choose what projects they want to focus on, attempt to fight back against the manifested destructed elements of the story in the mission, and deal with how the resolution of the mission affects the character’s long term goals and their daily lives.

While there has been a trend in a few more well known iterations of games based on the Forged in the Dark engine to move away from some of the more granular aspects of Forged in the Dark resolution, most of those standards as still present in this game. The baseline of the game is taking an action to resolve a situation, rolling a number of dice based on the ratings of the action being used, modified by help provided by others and additional dice provided by taking a dangerous compromise, and taking the highest result of the dice. If your highest die is 1-3, you don’t get what you want, if it’s a 4-5, you get it with a complication, and on a 6, you do exactly what you wanted to do the way you wanted to do it.

Downtime allows you to do things like recover from stress or start and advance long term projects. Mission objectives that can’t be resolved with a single action are tracked with clocks. Fallout can force the PCs to deal with enemy attacks when they aren’t ready, or see their opposition increase in tier, meaning that the PCs will  have a harder time advancing mission clocks against the threats they face (usually because it takes more successes to fill in a clock to completion).

Depending on the series playset, there are aspects similar to claiming territory in Blades in the Dark. You might expand your superhero hideout’s resources, the carrier ship facilities of your bastion, or shut down aspects of an ongoing conspiracy.

Transforming the Forged in the Dark Engine

One of the ways that Girl by Moonlight addresses the genre is by introducing Transcendence. When characters meet the conditions by which they transform, they gain access to the Transcendent special abilities on their playbook, gain the use of armor, pick up more dots in some of their action ratings, and gain increased effect. Remember when we said that the opposition tier might go up, making it harder to fill your mission clocks . . . this is one of the ways you can counter that. Of course, there are also some powerful forces that you really can’t act against unless you are transcended.

There are a limited number of actions you can take while you are transcended. Because actions, especially in missions, represent more than just punching someone once or lifting a heavy object, this doesn’t mean that you only stay transformed for a minute or two, but it does mean that you only have so many mechanically significant, player driven moments with your transcended powers.

In many Forged in the Dark games, when your stress track is full, you leave the scene and take some kind of long term mark or injury before your character returns to play. Instead of leaving the scene, a stressed-out character falls into Eclipse. Eclipse is like the concept of the Darkest Self from Monsterhearts. You don’t become an enemy fighting against your friends, but the actions you are taking are harmful to your psyche and push yourself beyond your personal boundaries. You leave eclipse when one of your allies performs the action that is listed on your playbook as your escape.

All of this is meant to show that you have to fight to act as your true self and make it count, and that because you can’t always be the self you want to be, you have these shadows that fall over you, telling you that you aren’t the person that you want to be.

The specific actions in Girl by Moonlight include:

• Defy
• Empathize
• Express
• Confess
• Forgive
• Perceive
• Analyze
• Conceal
• Flow

The playbooks that the game uses include the following:

• Enigma (the mysterious character that helps the others while hiding who they are even from their allies)
• Stranger (the character that doesn’t connect with others as well as they do with things)
• Time Traveller (someone that knows what happens in one version of the future, and is trying to change things)
• Harmony (two characters in such a harmonious relationship that they act together to accomplish things)
• Guardian (the honor bound hero)
• Outsider (the character with a shady past and a rivalry with one of their allies)
• Unlikely Hero (the normal person who helps the other protagonists, and may not see what’s special about themselves)

Before we move on from the playbooks, I would just like to quote how your character views the world if they fall into Eclipse as the Unlikely Hero: “you are not who they need you to be. You’re weak, useless, unworthy of their friendship. They have given so much to you, and in return you give them nothing.”

Girl by Moonlight. I don’t know why you need to attack me personally, but I’m telling my therapist about this.

Another unique aspect of Girl by Moonlight are links. You gain links with different characters, and you can spend them in a number of ways to help one another, like recovering stress, ignoring harm, boosting an ally’s action, or preventing them from falling into eclipse. This is to reinforce the fact that the protagonists aren’t just individuals working towards a common goal, but that working together is one of the protagonists’ goals.

The Series

A game of Girl by Moonlight is a combination of picking your playbook, and picking the series that you are going to play. Series may have special rules that affect the general rules of the game, like the shrines that grant special abilities in At the Brink of the Abyss, the modified means by which the characters must recover stress and transcendence in Beneath a Rotting Sky, the rules for bonding with your giant robot friends in On the Sea of Stars, or the intimate moment rules for In a Maze of Dreams. They also have specific series abilities that can be taken in addition to playbook abilities, as well as customized transcendent abilities.

While there is a general theme for each of the series, the group still customizes and details the elements when they discuss what series they want to play. For example, they will often define the form the series opposition takes, where the characters derive their powers, what the mundane obligations of the characters are, and what end they are working towards, or fighting against.

The series included in the book are the following:

• At the Brink of the Abyss (magical girls as superheroes fighting for a better future)
• Beneath a Rotting Sky (magical girls as supernatural hunters fighting against a corruption that will ultimately break them)
• On a Sea of Stars (magical girls as mech pilots defending the last vestiges of human society against a destructive alien entity and its minions)
• In a Maze of Dreams (magical girls as manifestations of the characters’ subconscious selves, investigating the dreams of others to uncover an ongoing conspiracy)

Each of these series not only presents a different collection of tropes to utilize in storytelling, but also uses these different settings to explore different aspects of characters dealing with their marginalization in the face of the challenges they encounter. Not every setting is about our protagonists fighting hard and prevailing in the end.

At the Brink of the Abyss is what many people will think of when they think of the magical girls genre. Characters have a mundane, day-to-day life, with responsibilities they must perform. There is a unifying villainous force that both infects day to day life, making it harder for our protagonists to be themselves, and manifested villainous monsters, which can be challenged with superheroic action. Monsters in the setting are usually regular people corrupted by the unifying evil force that heroes are working against and can often be “saved” by reaching the human within the monster and appealing to their better nature. While the PCs still need to deal with the evil force corrupting society, they can defeat evil and make the world better. Some of the people that are adversaries are just people that don’t understand how they have been manipulated. It’s an overall more positive and optimistic setting, emphasizing perseverance and communication to overcome bigotry.

Beneath a Rotting Sky is perhaps the polar opposite of At the Brink of the Abyss. A very horror-inflected series, the evil that is corrupting society is so entrenched in the world that it’s not likely that it can ever be cleansed. If characters want to remove stress and recharge their powers, they need to consume the hearts of the monsters they hunt. They must deal with an opposing group of hunters who act as their rivals. They are portrayed as survivors, doing the best they can for as long as they can, until they can’t anymore. They try to do what they do because they don’t want to give up, not because they can win. In some ways, they are never fully free of the taint that has affected society, even when acting against the monsters of the setting, and may even come into conflict with others who are just trying to do the same things that the protagonists are doing. This series really explores the stress of existing in a world that actively resists change, and rather than moving forward, sometimes actively moves backward.

On a Sea of Stars splits the difference between the two previously detailed series. The humans’ last bastion isn’t as open and welcoming as it should be, meaning that the PCs may need to fight to make the surviving human society better in addition to fighting against the external forces trying to destroy humanity. It’s not assumed that the PCs will succeed, like At the Brink of the Abyss, but they aren’t doomed to eventually fall, as in Beneath a Rotting Sky. On a Sea of Stars puts an emphasis on building defenses and improving the human bastions, so that they can survive while the PCs are out taking the fight to the alien leviathans, which introduces the idea that big, grand gestures aren’t the only thing necessary to be successful, but also long term planning and change.

In a Maze of Dreams is the most conceptual of the settings. In superhero settings like the one detailed in At the Brink of the Abyss, the character’s heroic identity is often referred to as their “alter-ego,’ their self in a different reality. In a Maze of Dreams presents the concept that your transformed identity is really your “alter-Id,” your drives and desires given active reign over your supercharged form. The emphasis in this series is that there isn’t a big, obvious villain to fight, rather there are nefarious people that are subtly linked, causing harm as part of an established superstructure. Characters go into the dreams of people to determine how and if they are parts of the conspiracy, while also exploring desires and aspirations that the protagonist doesn’t fully understand. In a way, it’s trying to do what’s right, without knowing what’s right, while also learning why you really do the things you do.

Viewing the game through the lens of the series playbooks brings into focus what the game is trying to accomplish, using both the magical girl genre and the Forged in the Dark engine as tools to that end. Each of these series explores an aspect of surviving and interacting with society as a queer individual, each one asking, “but how would it change if you had to face this?” In some ways, it feels like the ultimate experience of this game would be to play through all these series and examine what they all say, and where those narratives overlap. That said, I can also see where some of these settings would be harder to engage with. For example, I could see running or playing in At the Brink of the Abyss or On a Sea of Stars, because when I’m gaming, I like at least the possibility of a happy ending. I may be able to engage with In a Maze of Dreams if I was in the right, introspective mindset, but I suspect that Under a Rotting Sky would be emotionally taxing for me in a way I wouldn’t enjoy.

That’s not a proclamation on what series are “good” or “bad.” I think, as a product, that Under a Rotting Sky and In a Maze of Dreams make the product feel more complete for the perspectives that those series offer. Other people are going to have different dials and perspectives they enjoy when they address these topics in a game.

Cosmic Heart Compact

 This game is going to be a great tool for using fantasy elements to explore important issues facing queer people in modern society, as well as exploring how marginalized people survive and work to change society in a narrative form. 

This is one of those games that I feel is just as strong as a commentary as it is as an actual game, but it balances that commentary and gamification well enough to be both. The specific phases of play support the exploration of the game’s themes by pacing the game in step with the topics introduced in the other phases. The four series do a wonderful job at touching on the same topics, while also turning the dials on the details up or down to explore the same philosophical questions with different priorities.

Losing the Crystal Star

I think anyone looking at this game closely will understand that it’s “magical girls used to produce a specific experience,” but it’s probably still worth noting that if you want a game that leans harder on blow by blow action against a villain of the week, the pace of this game is probably going to be more deliberate and more introspective than you want to scratch that itch. It’s not really a failing of the game, so much as an easily foreseen misalignment of expectations.

Recommended–If the product fits in your broad area of gaming interests, you are likely to be happy with this purchase.

This game is going to be a great tool for using fantasy elements to explore important issues facing queer people in modern society, as well as exploring how marginalized people survive and work to change society in a narrative form. In addition to its use as an active tool at the gaming table, both for having fun and exploring perspectives, I think that anyone that is concerned about queer marginalization, and who enjoys engaging with tabletop gaming rules will benefit from reading through this book, even if they never get the game into active use.

If you just want to punch evil in the face after your magical girl transformation, you may still get something out of this game, just know that the focus of the game isn’t squarely fixed on that aspect of the story as the primary narrative. Even at that, there are still some series and playbooks that lean more closely to what you may want out of the game.

Maybe someday, when enough people have played games like this, and internalized what they learn at the gaming table, they’ll realize that Samantha should have been able to be accepted as a witch even though she married a man. Her current partner didn’t make her any less of a witch, even when she wasn’t actively using her powers.

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We know the meme: players latch onto the most insignificant goblin of a side character and ignore the walking plot hook in the fancy cloak. They’ll obsess over the most minor, minute details of a crime scene while completely missing the big obvious clue tacked to the board on the wall. They’ll squander all their time in the big city shopping and negotiating the price of a room instead of following the leads to the cultist sewer hideout you ever so painstakingly laid out for them.

The meme is funny because it’s true, but it can also be exhausting, especially if you’re not running a sandbox campaign and must steer your party back toward the plot. (And double-especially if you’re a newer GM or the type of GM that doesn’t handle curve balls well.)

Thankfully, there are techniques we can use to mitigate the “side character cinnamon bun effect,” as I like to call it. And if your players are stubborn, and you can’t seem to redirect their energy, there are ways to harness their attention for the benefit of your campaign.

It all boils down to how you describe things.

EYES AND EARS

As the GM, you are your players’ eyes, ears, and other senses. The choices you make when describing your game literally build the way they perceive their characters’ world, and their perceptions of the world will determine their actions. When they latch onto the wrong thing, be it the goblin barkeep instead of the mysterious figure in the corner, or the stale corner of bread instead of the bloody murder weapon, nine times out of 10, it’s a failure of description. Either you’ve got too much, too little, or the wrong kind altogether.

Let’s break ’em down, look at where things go wrong, and talk about how we can course-correct when they do.

TOO MUCH INFORMATION

Imagine this: your characters arrive in a big city. A central trading hub on the coast, bustling with merchants and guilds and religious orders, tourists, and travelers of all sorts. It’s a big change from their time blazing trails in the wilderness. It makes sense you’d want to describe everything from the ramparts to the docks to the magical castle in the center of town. But what happens after you spend five minutes recounting all the wonders the city has to offer?

Instead of dashing off like kids at Disney World, taking in all the wonderful and dangerous streets and districts you’ve prepared, your players immediately ask for the nearest inn and haggle over the cost of a night’s stay.

They could be playing in the moment and just want to establish a home base for their time in town. Or, it could be, in your attempt to impress upon them the grandeur of the location, you’ve overloaded them with information, and they don’t see the forest for the trees (so to speak).

If you find yourself constantly relaying a ton of descriptive information to your players only to be met with blank stares and “ummmms” when asked what they want to do next, you likely need to pare back what you’re relaying.

HOW TO FIX IT

Fixing too much information is kinda simple and really fun, and it’s all thanks to two little psychological tricks known as the primacy and immediacy effects. Basically, when we’re presented with a list of information, we’re going to remember the first thing we heard and the last thing we heard. The stuff in the middle? Might as well toss it into the sea. There are exceptions to this, obviously, but in general – first thing, last thing. Those are what’ll stick.

So let’s use these psychological effects to our advantage when we’re describing the city (or any other important aspect of the game world) by first making sure the two most essential elements we want to relay – in our example, the size and the sewers – come first and last. Then, we can devote extra time to describing those particular aspects while glossing over the stuff in the middle.

For example: “The port city sprawls out from the ocean like a giant squid that’s beached itself on the shore. The buildings fill your field of view, stretching from nearly one end of the horizon to the other.” (We’ve started by emphasizing the size.) “As sailors, merchants, and other citizens go about their busy days…” (And glossed over the unimportant details.)” You notice something odd – one of the metal grates covering the entrance to the sewer system has been pried open, and a trail of muddy footprints lead inside.” (And dropped the details about the sewer cult.)

TOO LITTLE INFORMATION

When your players seem to be latching onto random NPCs and making their own trouble when you want them to follow up the plot threads you think you’ve been subtly laying down for them, they’re likely suffering from a lack of information.

If I’ve learned one thing in over twenty years of running games, it’s this: when it comes to laying hints and clues for my PCs to follow, however subtle I think I’m being, I’m actually being 100x more obscure. Subtlety is an excellent technique for many, many forms of entertainment – a good mystery novel, a tense costume drama, a black-box stage play – but TTRPGs are not enhanced by subtlety.

HOW TO FIX IT

There’s an old marketing adage that says a customer must encounter information about your product 7 times before deciding to purchase it. It’s an old adage because the number of times has increased dramatically in the 21st century, but specifics aside, it’s still a good rule of thumb for how often you need to drop hints and describe clues before your players will start picking up what you’re putting down.

If you’re nudging your characters in the direction of a plot, repeat the hooks often throughout a single session. If you want them to realize the conspiracy to overthrow the king signals their allegiance by wearing the colors green and gold, then do not mention the green and gold robes of a single NPC once and then, four sessions later, note the streaks of green and gold dyed hair of the assassin NPC. That’s not enough repetition of information.

Instead, talk about a whole gaggle of green and gold-clothed individuals taking up a corner of the local cafe. Mention the proliferation of green and gold decorations in windows. The banners hanging from horses and wagons. The scarfs and hats worn by a large number of people in the city.

Don’t be subtle. Hit them over the head with the descriptions and then reiterate. Reiterate. Reiterate.

THE WRONG KIND COMPLETELY

This description faux pas is often some combination of the first two, and one I’ve personally fallen into numerous times throughout my tenure as a GM. What usually happens is you get so wrapped up in the description of a scene, focusing in loving detail on the fauna of the forest or the tapestries in the library or whatever your current personal fixation happens to be, that you completely forget to describe the important elements needed for your players to grok what’s going on in the scene.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve forgotten to describe a book, lever, or some other essential item while I was caught up describing the intricately designed marble fountain. And so, of course, my players focus on the fountain. I spent so much time describing it, it has to be important right?

Oops.

HOW TO FIX IT

Course correcting this error is easy-ish, depending on what you’ve prepped. Of course, the best option is to avoid mistakes altogether by keeping notes on important details so you don’t get away from yourself.

If you’re the type of GM who likes to prepare their descriptions beforehand, read them back a few times with a critical eye and make sure you’re hitting the important bits. If you’re like me and prefer to come up with most of your descriptions on the fly, give yourself some bullet points so you don’t get too carried away.

If, however, you find yourself far afield from where you intended, all is not lost. The easiest in-the-moment way to fix the wrong kind of description is to alter your plans and make that fountain the scene’s focus.

Sometimes, a little ripple like that can throw off your entire prep work, though, so in those instances, call for a perception check (and maybe fudge the results if you need to), and voila! The clever PCs have seen through your red herring and found the real clue that was totally there the whole time…

YOUR PLAYERS’ GIFT TO YOU: When Things Go Wrong

No one is going to nail their descriptions perfectly every time. And no group of players will stay on task 100% of the time, either. But when your players do decide to focus on the side character or the detail of minor importance, take it as the gift that it is: this is them telling you what they find exciting and compelling.

That’s not a failure; it’s valuable information that you can take back to your prep and use to your advantage the next time you run a game.

PRACTICING WHAT WAS PREACHED

Since there was a lot of information in this article, I thought taking some of the key points and repeating them would be helpful. Remember, when it comes to description, you should:

• Keep it short and direct
• Reiterate
• Reiterate
• Reiterate
• Ensure you focus on the important bits

What about you? When was the last time your players latched onto a completely unexpected minor detail and derailed your entire prep? Let us know in the comments section below!

Read more »

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Couchpotato spotted that the Centre of Nirn Mod has been released: Journey to the Centre of Nirn "Look not to the Heavens but to the ground beneath your feetFor there the Gods have sown the makings of deceipt" Follow in the steps of a famous explorer as you follow the clues to the location of a long lost city.... Read more »

Learn more about the Romans of King Arthur: Legion IX: Meet the Romans! - Praetorius Ave! We have finally revealed the release date of our upcoming tactical RPG, King Arthur: Legion IX, but we haven't unveiled everything about the game yet. Today we will be looking at a character that we did not mention so far, probably because he wouldn't want the fame and glory anyway.... Read more »

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Fextralife summarizes this week's gaming news: Gaming News – Remnant 2 DLC, Darkest Dungeon 2 Free Content, PoP Sands of Time Remake and MORE! Timestamp0:00 - Top RPG News of the Week0:04 - Star Wars Outlaws Release Date1:09 - Albion... Read more »

This article is one in a series where we look at types of adventures and examine

• how we prepare them.
• how we run them.
• what pitfalls we might run into.
• how we avoid these pitfalls.

These articles include:

• Dungeon Crawls
• Infiltrations and Heists
• Investigations and Mysteries
• Overland Exploration and Travel
• Missions and Quest Chains
• Defense
• Roleplay and Intrigue
• Combat
• Mashups or the Undefined

Your own adventure types and how you run them may differ from mine. That's totally fine. There are many right ways to enjoy this game.

Robin Laws's book Adventure Crucible – Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG inspired my thoughts on this topic.

For a far more in-depth look at running monsters in combat encounters, please check out Forge of Foes, our book on building and running fantastic monsters for your 5e games.

Understanding Combat Adventures

Good fantasy RPG sessions most often include mixtures of exploration, roleplay, and combat. Adventures or sessions focusing on only one pillar of play may bypass players' preferences for the other elements.

But, on occasion, we find ourselves with a session focused almost exclusively on combat.

Completely combat-focused sessions may occur when characters face a big battle at the beginning of the session and we know this battle is going to take up most of the session. Other combat-focused sessions might happen when the characters face a gauntlet of battles, one right after the other, whether they're exploring a dangerous dungeon, defending a location, or otherwise find themselves with a series of battles staged in sequence.

Combat-focused sessions should be rare. The best sessions include scenes and situations with opportunities for roleplaying, exploration, and combat. We want situations where the characters make meaningful decisions to move the story forward.

But combat-focused sessions do happen and thus are worth examining.

Preparing Combat Sessions

During prep, GMs can prepare combat sessions by

• understanding how these combat encounters begin and where they occur.
• deciding on a style for combat. Are you going to run it in the theater of the mind, on a combat battle mat, or run abstract combat?
• choosing a goal for the combat encounter. Sometimes the battle isn't all about killing the monsters but achieving another outcome.
• selecting monsters for each combat encounter. Rich combat encounters often include two or more different monster types with some synergies between them – big brutes up front and nasty ranged attackers in the back for example.
• choosing the environment surrounding the encounter. What larger environmental effects might be in play in the combat arena?
• selecting interesting terrain features the characters and monsters might use (see Anatomy of an Environmental Effect – Chernobog's Well)
• planning potential shifts in the encounter. What events might change the course of the battle?
• outlining the transitions between each combat encounter. What takes the characters from battle A to battle B to battle C?
• building out, drawing, or preparing your battle map – either digital or physical.
• gathering miniatures, tokens, or digital assets if you're playing online.

Running Combat Sessions

For 5e games and other fantasy d20 games, combat tends to be the most well-articulated and refined style of gameplay. For combat-focused sessions, GMs need only start the session and get into the first battle. Between combat encounters ensure the sinew is there to connect one battle to the next. The rest falls on the rules of combat for our chosen system.

Depending on the complexity of the encounters, the number of characters, and their level, combat encounters may be easy or difficult to run. The higher level the characters – the more power and capability they bring to the battlefield – the trickier it can be to maintain a consistent challenge. The dials of monster difficulty can help balance such a challenge.

When running combat, continue to draw the players into the fiction of the world. Describe the situation from the point of view of the characters. Describe what attacks and hits look like. Ask players to do the same. Reveal secrets and clues when appropriate. Include opportunities for roleplaying with NPCs and enemies before, during, and after the battle. Avoid getting lost in the mechanics of combat and remember the story going on in the world.

Pitfalls of Combat Sessions

Here are several potential pitfalls when running combat-focused adventures and sessions:

• Too many hard combat encounters becomes repetitive and tiresome.
• Combat goals aren't clear. Players don't know why they're fighting.
• Combat focuses exclusively on the mechanics with little focus on the story or fiction.
• Combat encounters are tactically boring.
• Players resent encounters built to contradict their characters' capabilities.
• Battles take too long. Players who enjoy roleplaying and exploration miss out.

Mitigating Pitfalls

GMs can help mitigate these pitfalls by

• mixing up easy and hard encounters or waves within a single encounter. Let the characters shine while fighting weaker foes as stronger ones come on later.
• clarifying encounter goals. Tell players how things work in the encounter so they know what they need to do.
• continually describe what's happening in the fiction of the game. Ask players to describe their actions including attacks and killing blows.
• include different monster types and terrain features to keep encounter tactics interesting.
• include lightning rods – monsters intended to show off the powerful capabilities of the characters.
• include elements of roleplaying and exploration during combat. What do the villains say? What do the characters discover about the world and situation as they fight for their lives?

An Uncommon Adventure Type

Combat-focused sessions are best held for big battles against boss monsters. Other session types in this series of articles offer a better balance of exploration, roleplaying, and combat. Combat-focused sessions are prevalent enough, however, for us to internalize what makes them fun and what we can do to avoid common pitfalls.

Build fantastic and intricate combat encounters and let the characters shine.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos including Build Your Own 5e and Add Black Flag's Luck to your 5e Games.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Offer opportunities for roleplaying even in the depths of the darkest dungeons.
• Mix up battles with several smaller foes and fewer large foes.
• Build encounters first from the fiction. What makes sense?
• Add motivation and distance rolls to random encounters for unique experiences.
• Include interactive monuments in bigger battles.
• Write down connections between the characters and the next session you’re running.
• Single monsters are at a significant disadvantage against a group of characters. This disadvantage gets worse the higher level the characters are.

Related Articles

• Running Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures
• The Story Focus of D&D
• A New Dungeon Master's Guide For Building Encounters

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

This article is one in a series where we look at types of adventures and examine

• how we prepare them.
• how we run them.
• what pitfalls we might run into.
• how we avoid these pitfalls.

These articles include:

• Dungeon Crawls
• Infiltrations and Heists
• Investigations and Mysteries
• Overland Exploration and Travel
• Missions and Quest Chains
• Defense
• Roleplay and Intrigue
• Combat
• Mashups or the Undefined

Your own adventure types and how you run them may differ from mine. That's totally fine. There are many right ways to enjoy this game.

Robin Laws's book Adventure Crucible – Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG inspired my thoughts on this topic.

Understanding Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures

In adventures focused on roleplaying and intrigue, the characters primarily talk to NPCs to accomplish goals or learn information. Intrigue adventures often overlap with Investigations and Mysteries with less of a focus on location-based clues and expanding the goals beyond uncovering mysteries.

Example goals in roleplay and intrigue adventures might include

• convincing royalty to commit military forces in a war.
• exposing treachery in a royal court.
• saving the life of a condemned prisoner.
• pitting two enemies against one another.
• learning the location of a secret treasure vault.
• getting permission to enter a closed city.
• asking priests to hand over a powerful artifact.

Roleplay and intrigue adventures are often built around a set of linear or networked scenes. In these scenes, the characters talk to one or more NPCs learning something or attaining a goal that leads them to the next scene.

Preparing Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures

During preparation for roleplay and intrigue adventures, GMs can focus on

• clarifying the goal of the adventure.
• fleshing out the backgrounds of notable NPCs.
• finding artwork they can show to players for each notable NPC.
• writing down what NPCs know and what they want.
• defining secrets and clues the characters might uncover when talking to NPCs.
• adding other adventure elements as needed from the eight steps.

Running Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures

Roleplay and intrigue adventures can begin with a strong start to bring the players into the game, clarify the goals of the adventure, set the stage, and let the players begin interacting with NPCs.

During play, the GM thinks as the NPCs would think given their backgrounds and goals as they interact with the players. As the conversation goes on, the GM may decide how NPCs react based on what the players say or they may have players roll ability checks if there's a meaningful chance for failure that doesn't end the adventure in a brick wall.

GMs can use ability checks to determine how easily or how difficult it is to acquire information from an NPC or shift the NPCs attitude without shutting off entire paths if the adventure on a single bad check.

Other elements from typical adventures may come up in these sessions including exploring locations or getting into a fight, even if the overall focus is on talking to NPCs.

Pitfalls of Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures

Roleplay and intrigue adventures might suffer from the following pitfalls:

• Players don't understand what they're doing or why.
• Too many roleplay scenes in a row can bore action-focused players.
• The characters blow important rolls or engage in the wrong approach and shut off critical paths for the story.
• Players don't understand how best to engage the NPCs.
• Characters have better social skills than their players have or vice versa.

Avoiding Pitfalls

GMs can avoid or mitigate these pitfalls by

• Clarifying the characters' goals regularly.
• Including other action-focused scenes in the adventure such as combat encounters or location exploration.
• Ensuring the whole story doesn't get shut down on bad rolls or poor approaches and instead leads the story down a different, potentially harder, but still interesting path.
• Use the result of a roll as a scale of how well or poorly something went instead of a hard success or failure. See 1d20 Shades of Gray.
• Offer suggestions to players who have a hard time understanding how to engage with characters. Don't let them make foolish mistakes their characters would know better than to make. Show them opportunities their characters would recognize.
• Use a high-charisma character's charisma as a baseline, recognizing that their character might be better at negotiating than the player is.
• Use a charismatic player's approach as a baseline even if their character has a lousy charisma. Don't always call for a roll.

A Common Sub-Adventure Type

Roleplay and intrigue adventures might often slide into or be shuffled into other larger adventures. As one of the core pillars of roleplaying games, roleplay and intrigue scenes appear often throughout campaigns and can drive the story forward as much, or more so, than other adventure types.

Clarifying the goal, building rich reactive NPCs, creating interesting paths forward regardless of the outcome, and delivering the other elements of gameplay can make roleplay and intrigue adventures as exciting as the most explosive combat encounters.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Running Evil Cities and 175 Free Tokens for Owlbear Rodeo.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:

• Dungeoncraft on Getting Cheap Miniatures
• Monsters of Drakkenheim
• Cairn 2e Boxed Set
• Tales of the Valiant Wight
• Why CR3 is the best CR
• New Search Engine for Sly Flourish!
• The Two Different Games at the Table

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

• Lazy DM Steps in an Online VTT World
• Handling Failure at the End of Campaigns
• Handling Flying Characters
• Feeling Bad After a Big Battle
• When to Give Out Magic Items

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Challenge high level characters by attacking several points — AC, saves, death saves, exhaustion, hit points, cumulative -1 penalties, and so on.
• Build big arenas for big boss battles with interesting terrain and layers of monsters.
• Offer weapon enchantment gemstones any character can affix to a weapon or armor to make it magical.
• Let the characters glimpse their final villains. Make villains and boss monsters ever present.
• With six regular players and two on-call players, five people have to cancel before you can’t get four to the table for a game.
• Print maps, pen in one- or two-word room descriptions, and make a list of potential inhabitants.
• Roll up treasure horde parcels and jot them down in your notes. Distribute them when it makes sense.

Related Articles

• Running Defense Adventures
• Running Overland Exploration and Travel Adventures
• Running Dungeon Crawls

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

This article is one in a series where we look at types of adventures and examine

• how we prepare them.
• how we run them.
• what pitfalls we might run into.
• how we avoid these pitfalls.

These articles include:

• Dungeon Crawls
• Infiltrations and Heists
• Investigations and Mysteries
• Overland Exploration and Travel
• Missions and Quest Chains
• Defense
• Roleplaying and Intrigue
• Mashups or the Undefined

Your own adventure types and how you run them may differ from mine. That's totally fine. There are many right ways to enjoy this game.

Robin Laws's book Adventure Crucible – Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG inspired my thoughts on this topic.

Understanding Defense Adventures

In defense adventures, the characters defend a location and its inhabitants from invaders, bandits, or monsters. This adventure type is structured similar to infiltrations and heists in that players spend significant time planning for the attack before the attack itself. I often refer to defense adventures as Seven Samurai adventures because of how well the model of Akira Kurosawa's classic samurai movie fits as a fantasy RPG adventure.

The typical scenario for a defense adventure includes:

• The characters are recruited by townsfolk (or someone similar) to defend a location.
• The characters plan and prepare the location and inhabitants for the coming attack.
• The attack begins with the invasion of a large enemy force.
• The characters focus on their part of the attack while NPCs defend their locations off-camera. Things might change, forcing the characters to move around.
• There's an aftermath.

Defense adventures don't have to follow this model perfectly but this scenario is a common approach.

Preparing a Defense Adventure

GMs can prepare for a defense-style adventure by

• defining the theme. Who are the attackers? Who are the defenders? What's the location like? What themes or flavor can we wrap around the adventure?
• finding or creating a suitable location for the defense and ensuring it has the right characteristics for a good defensible position.
• further defining the "villagers". Who asks the characters to defend them? What's their secret?
• preparing a menu of options the characters can choose to prepare the defense including training NPCs, fortifying defenses, spying on the attackers, preparing weapons or spells, or engaging in other activities to aid in the defense.
• outlining the villains. Who are they? Who leads them? Where do they come from? Where are they located before the attack? How many are there? How will they attack?
• preparing the remaining eight steps as needed.

Running a Defense Adventure

Like a heist adventure, the players plan their defense during the first half of the adventure. Give players time to plan their defense, talk to NPCs, scout the villains, and engage in other activities to prepare for the attack. Improvise ability checks to see how well their defenses hold up.

When the attack begins, focus the spotlight on the characters and their part of the battle. Describe the results of the larger battle based on the defenses the characters put up and how well they did on their checks but keep the spotlight focused on the characters.

Pitfalls of Defense Adventures

Defense adventures might suffer one or more of the following pitfalls.

• The characters' defenses don't come into play – they wasted their time.
• The characters' defenses are so good there's no threat from the villains.
• The players don't know how to prepare the location. They don't understand how they should defend the location.
• The location is too hard to defend. It's too wide open with no good choke points or defensible positions.
• The characters split up instead of staying together making it harder to run the whole adventure.

Avoiding Pitfalls

GMs can avoid or mitigate these pitfalls by

• ensuring the characters' defenses come into play by improvising the descriptions of the villains' attacks.
• ensure there's enough variance to the attack of the villains to still make it a threat even with a very solid defense.
• ensuring there's a clear list of options the characters can choose from to build up the location's defenses.
• during prep, ensuring the location has clear defensible positions and choke points like ravines, rivers, swamplands, walls, towers, and other defensible positions.
• Push players to keep their characters together during the fight so you don't have to run split battles all over the location.

A Fantastic Situation for Heroic Tales

Defense-based adventures stand as an excellent adventure style to give the players agency to shape their own story. It's a perfect example of situation-based adventures in which the GM sets up the situation and the characters navigate it. GMs and players play the situation out together, building a story at the table neither side could have guessed before it began.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos including a Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands Deep Dive and 5e Travel Systems.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:

• Jim Ward Passes Away
• Bob World Builder's Survey of D&D and WOTC Popularity
• Legos and Sneakers and Hawaiian Shirts
• Tome of Beasts 2023 on D&D Beyond
• The SF Patreon Q&A Database
• Larian says No BG3 Expansions or BG4
• Reach and Run Awesome Campaign Endings

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

• Too Much Comedy and Joking at our Serious D&D Game
• How Much is Gold Worth? Function Economies in our D&D Games
• Lazy Encounter Benchmark for Multiple Battles in a Day

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Give players the option to avoid monsters if desired.
• Test future boss fights with similar but reskinned interim battles.
• Think about the hooks between each character and elements from the next session.
• Give big monsters a way to threaten back-line characters.
• Give characters a painful option to break out of effects that take away their actions.
• Mix and match 5e elements from several published sourcebooks.
• Bathe your dungeon crawl in interesting lore.

Related Articles

• Running Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures
• Running Overland Exploration and Travel Adventures
• Running Infiltration and Heist Adventures

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

This article is one in a series where we look at types of adventures and examine

• how we prepare them.
• how we run them.
• what pitfalls we might run into.
• how we avoid these pitfalls.

This series of articles includes:

• Dungeon Crawls
• Infiltrations and Heists
• Investigations and Mysteries
• Overland Exploration and Travel
• Missions and Quest Chains
• Defense
• Intrigue

Your own categorization of adventure types and how to run them may differ from mine. That's totally fine. There are many right ways to enjoy this game.

Robin Laws's book Adventure Crucible – Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG inspired my thoughts on this topic.

Understanding Missions and Quest Chains

In mission-based adventures the characters accomplish several goals across a series of scenes. The scenes may be linear or run in a network where players choose different paths leading to different future missions.

Often mission-based adventures take several sessions, perhaps an entire campaign, to complete. Each leg of the mission might be its own adventure.

Each mission or quest of the quest chain might be small – like killing a fire giant boss at a burned out watchtower, acquiring one of several needed items, or getting information from the shady vendor in the Lower Reaches. In a series of wartime missions, the characters accomplish specific missions while war rages around them.

Missions might also be built so the characters attempt to accomplish tasks before the bad guys, or the characters face a rival group attempting to complete the same or parallel quests. This competition results in an ever-changing situation as both groups follow their chains of quests.

Some example missions include:

• Collecting three keys (out of 5) to open the vault of Ibraxus.
• Destroying the four sub-lieutenants of King Lucan the vampire lord.
• Disabling the four obelisks to prevent the opening of the doorway of the Black Cathedral.
• Conducting four missions to thwart the hobgoblin armies of Lord Krash.
• Recovering four powerful artifacts required to defeat Orcus, Lord of Undeath.

Preparing Mission-based Adventures

GMs may prepare for mission-based adventures by

• determining the overall goal of the mission or quest chain.
• building an outline or tree for the quests in the chain.
• filling out the adventure details of the next quest or mission in the chain with the eight steps such as locations, NPCs, monsters, and treasure.
• outlining which quests might follow the next one.
• determine the path and progress of rival groups following these same quests if any.

Running Missions

When running mission-based adventures or campaigns, the GM should

• clarify the goals of the overall quest chain.
• clarify the paths the characters can take and choices they can make when conducting their missions.
• run the current mission or quest as its own typical RPG scene or adventure.
• offer the choices for the next possible quests in the chain.

Mission or Quest Chain Pitfalls

When running mission-based or quest-chain adventures, GMs might encounter the following pitfalls:

• The choices aren't clear. Players don't know which mission to follow next.
• Players forget why they're following these quests.
• The mission paths don't offer meaningful choices. Characters just follow the steps in a predetermined order.
• Large chains of missions can be thwarted when only one mission is accomplished (see all or nothing collection quests).

Avoiding Pitfalls

GMs can avoid these pitfalls by

• regularly clarifying the goal of the mission or quest chain.
• clarifying the options the characters can take and ensuring each option is meaningful.
• not running too many missions.
• ensuring each leg of the quest chain shows clear progress towards the goal.
• ensuring the success of a single mission doesn't thwart the large plans of the villains or characters by using the three of five keys quest model.

A Common Adventure Style

Mission-based adventures are one of the most common styles of adventures. Hopefully these guidelines help you keep your mission-based adventures on track with meaningful choices, clear options, and dynamic situations.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Roll Twice and the Elven Orb – Shadowdark Gloaming Session 24 Lazy GM Prep.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:

• Dungeon Crawl Classics Humble Bundle
• Worlds Without Number SRD in CC0
• WOTC's "Do You Like Me" Survey
• Hasbro's Chris Cocks on D&D and AI
• WOTC Partners with StartPlaying.Games
• Daggerheart Open Beta Available
• Lazy DM's Companion On Sale!
• Dungeon Chambers
• Challenging High-Level Characters

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

• Getting Players to Speak Up During (Online) Games
• Staying Excited about Long Campaigns

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Show players the results in the world of the choices they made.
• Show players how powerful their characters have become.
• Throw in lots of low CR monsters to fireball or turn or otherwise blow away.
• Always lean towards putting meaningful choices in front of the players.
• Clarify goals selected by the characters often -- at least once per session.
• Bring old NPCs back and show how they’ve changed.
• Mix your adventure types. Dungeon crawls, heists, and intrigue all work together into a unique mashup of an adventure.

Related Articles

• Running Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures
• Running Defense Adventures
• Running Dungeon Crawls

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

This article is one in a series where we look at particular adventure types and examine

• how we prepare them.
• how we run them.
• what pitfalls we might run into.
• how we avoid those pitfalls.

This series of articles includes:

• Dungeon Crawls
• Infiltrations and Heists
• Investigations and Mysteries
• Travel
• Missions
• Defense
• Intrigue

Each article describes one angle on these adventure types. Your own approach may differ and that's totally fine. There are many right ways to enjoy this game.

Robin Laws's book Adventure Crucible – Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG inspired my thoughts on this topic.

---

A quick note – the Lazy DM's Companion, my book of RPG tools, guidelines, and adventure generators, is on sale for 50% off the PDF and 20% off the softcover and PDF package!

The sale ends 21 March so pick it up today at:

https://shop.slyflourish.com/products/the-lazy-dms-companion

---

Understanding Travel Adventures

For the sake of this article, overland exploration and travel adventures follow the characters as they travel from one place to another, usually over significant distances across the surface of the world.

Sometimes the characters know clearly where they're headed. Other times they might only be following vague rumors. The paths they follow might be well known or something they discover as they go.

Travel adventures might be run as hex crawls, pointcrawls, or linear paths of connected locations. They could be a quick journey during a single game or run over several sessions.

Resources for Travel

Your chosen RPG might include material for running travel scenes. Two books offer excellent guidance and systems for running travel adventures for 5e games: Uncharted Journeys by Cubicle 7 and Trials and Treasure for Level Up Advanced 5e by EN World publishing. Uncharted Journeys offers a solid system for travel and a huge range of potential encounters. Trials and Treasure includes excellent random encounter tables, character roles, weather options for various climates, and more. If you choose only one book, start with Trials and Treasure.

Preparing Travel Adventures

Preparing for an overland exploration or travel adventure might include

• defining the starting point, the destination, the distance, and the path.
• understanding how you plan on running the journey – point crawls, hex crawls, a linear series of encounters, or a single encounter during the journey.
• defining potential paths.
• preparing a list of roles and activities the characters engage in during travel.
• preparing a random weather table.
• writing down potential encounter locations along the journey for each node in the pointcrawl or within one or more of the hexes along the journey.
• preparing a list of encounters – random, fixed, or a mix of both.
• writing down secrets and clues, NPCs, or treasure the characters might discover along the journey.

Running Travel Adventures

Like dungeon crawls, travel adventures can follow a particular model of gameplay. This procedure includes

• clarifying the starting point and destination for the journey.
• asking each player to select a role for the journey – scout, pathfinder, quartermaster, etc. Characters might instead choose to aid someone else.
• roll on a weather table each day to determine what weather the characters deal with that day.
• expend daily resources such as food and water.
• have the characters roll ability checks based on their role. A scout may notice creatures before the creatures notice the characters. A pathfinder may stay on course or get lost. A quartermaster may give the characters temporary hit points or lose resources.
• roll for monuments or other notable features as they travel or use one of your predetermined locations.
• roll for random encounters. Even if they don't encounter something, you might roll to see what came by recently or what might be coming. You might roll twice and mix two encounters together.
• move on to the next day.

Pitfalls for Travel Adventures

Here are some common pitfalls for travel adventures:

• Too much time is spent on travel when the real story is happening at the destination.
• Too many downward beats or hard encounters – it feels like a slog.
• Travel feels like a needless chore or time-wasting filler.
• Travel doesn't offer meaningful choices or actions.

Avoiding Travel Pitfalls

Here are some ways to keep travel on track.

• Drop in relevant secrets and clues the characters discover during their journey to tell them about the world, its inhabitants, and elements of the larger story.
• Include interesting monuments to solidify specific locations and encounters and act as catalysts for secrets and clues.
• Include roleplay and exploration scenes, not just combat encounters.
• Run some easy encounters the characters can resolve many different ways.
• Let characters get the drop on monsters and give them the choice to fight them or not.
• If travel isn't interesting or challenging, shorten it or skip it completely and get to the more important scenes the players care about.

A Bridge Between Other Adventures

Travel adventures are often a bridge between one part of the story and the next part. With careful planning and execution, travel can offer stories just as interesting as other types of adventures.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted YouTube videos with Thoughts on Obsidian for TTRPG Prep and the Lazy DM's Companion Sale.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:

• Last Week's Sly Flourish RPG Newsletter
• Planestrider
• Surviving Strangehollow
• Lazy DM's Companion On Sale
• NASA Releases a 5e Adventure
• Chaosium RPG Design Contest
• Taking Notes During and After the Game

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

• Running City of Arches as an Open Table Game
• Villainous Plans and the Three of Five Keys Model
• Introducing New Players to RPGs
• Secrets and Lore as Character Knowledge
• Secrets and Clues in Dark Sun

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Challenge high-level characters by attacking several vectors: AC, various saves, area attacks, advantageous terrain, flippable environmental effects, and so on.
• Benchmark encounters with the Lazy Encounter Benchmark: A battle may be deadly if the sum total of monster CRs is 1/4 the total of character levels; or half of character levels if they're 5th level or above.
• Tweak the Lazy Encounter Benchmark based on what you know of the characters. Really powerful? Pretend there is one additional character of the party's level.
• Warn players when they're going to enter a long fight. Change the fight midway and keep up the story to make long battles interesting.
• Include switchable terrain that works against the characters at first and for them later on. For example, an unholy effigy gives evil creatures advantage but gives characters advantage when turned into a holy effigy.
• Level characters after significant accomplishments in the story.
• Damage is the biggest threat a monster offers that doesn't take agency away from the characters. Want a bigger threat? Do more damage.

Related Articles

• Running Travel Scenes in 5e
• Running Dungeon Crawls
• Running Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

This article is one in a series where we look at particular adventure types – how to prepare them, how to run them, what pitfalls we might run into, and how we can overcome these pitfalls.

This series of articles includes:

• Dungeon Crawls
• Infiltrations and Heists
• Investigations and Mysteries
• Missions
• Travel
• Defense
• Intrigue

These articles describe one approach for these adventure types and your own style may differ. That's totally fine. There are many right ways to enjoy this game.

Robin Laws's book Adventure Crucible – Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG inspired my thoughts on this topic.

Understanding Investigations and Mysteries

In investigation and mysteries, one or more previous events have occurred which have led to the current situation. The characters spend their time in the adventure learning what happened and potentially changing the course of future events based on what they find. During investigations, the characters talk to people, explore locations, uncover clues, and face those foes who seek to thwart them.

Mysteries are difficult to run because, unlike narrative fiction, we don't know where the characters are going to go, what they're going to investigate, or what clues they might pick up. They could identify the key villain in the first scene or pursue tangents away from the clues you expect them to follow. Both of these situations need to be accounted for in your prep and play.

Preparing Investigations and Mysteries

These steps can help you prepare to run an investigation or mystery:

• Develop the starting situation. What happened? Who did what? What is the timeline of previous events?
• Develop your strong start. How and when do the characters get involved in the situation? What hooks them into the mystery?
• Develop a list of NPCs the characters can talk to. Who are they? What was their involvement in the situation? What do they want? What are their goals? Avoid introducing the main villain too early if you're trying to keep them a secret.
• Develop locations the characters can investigate. Where can they go? How can they uncover the clues they eventually need? What happened at these locations?
• Develop a list of secrets and clues. Keep them abstract from their place of discovery so you can drop in these clues when it makes sense based on the investigation undertaken by the characters. In investigations and mysteries, you may need more than ten.
• Write down monsters and treasure for the more traditional adventure elements.

Running an Investigation or Mystery

The following list provides a structure around running investigations and mysteries:

• Use your strong start and sink in the hook so the characters, and their players, want to dig in and figure out what's going on.
• Introduce NPCs helpful to the characters who can give them a push in the right direction.
• As the characters investigate, drop in clues that lead the characters to other locations, meeting other NPCs, and discovering more clues and so on.
• Throughout the adventure, expose clues until the players can piece together the whole scenario.
• Add henchmen or other hostiles to add some combat as desired.
• When the time is right, drop in your villain and have a big confrontation.

Common Pitfalls for Investigations and Mysteries

Investigation and mysteries may sometimes include the following pitfalls. During prep and play, keep these pitfalls in mind so you can avoid them and run a fun evolving game.

• There's only one way to find the right clues and the characters don't follow it.
• The characters discover the villain or source of the mystery too early.
• The characters never discover the villain or figure out the mystery.
• The GM leads the players on too much – making it clear the players didn't figure it out but had the results spoon-fed to them.
• The pacing gets tiresome. Players who want to crack some skulls end up bored.
• The mystery is too complex. Players can't figure out all the important details.

Avoiding Pitfalls

Consider the following ways to avoid the pitfalls listed above.

• Keep the clues needed to uncover the mystery abstract from their location of discovery. Drop in clues along the path the characters take during the investigation.
• Don't introduce the villain too early. Keep them a blank spot in the story until it's time for their revelation.
• Provide the right amount of information for the players to be able to piece together the puzzle themselves. Don't spell it out for them.
• Clarify that the characters are the ones discovering information and piecing it together – not you the GM.
• Have multiple ways to uncover the truth. Don't let discovery of the mystery hinge on a single element the characters might miss.
• Include combat and skirmishes to keep combat-focused players interested.
• Keep in mind that players only grasp about half of what you reveal. Keep mysteries simple enough that players can actually piece them together.

Build Situations, Not Mystery Novels

A key to running a good investigation and mystery is not to assume you know how the players will discover the truth. Build and set up the situation during prep and let the characters follow their own path to their ultimate discovery.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

The Lazy DM's Companion is currently on sale for 50% off the PDF and 20% off the PDF and softcover version! If you don't have this book, now is a fantastic time to pick it up! The Lazy DM's Companion includes tools, tables, and tips for running awesome fantasy D20 games. Grab it today!

Last Week's Lazy RPG Newsletter

I had a cold last week and didn't record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast). Instead, I wrote a text-version of the talk show in the Lazy RPG Newsletter for 3 March 2024 with news, tips, and Patreon questions and answers.

I did post a YouTube video on Using Paper Character Sheets.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Name villains and sentient opponents. Make each one unique.
• Have players identify monsters with interesting physical characteristics.
• Add an interesting usable environmental object or effect into significant combat encounters.
• Tie clues, treasure, and MacGuffins to the backgrounds, knowledge, and history of the characters.
• Reveal the world through the eyes of the characters.
• Ask each character what they think about from their past and their current larger goals during short or long rests.
• Show the characters the results of their actions in the world.

Related Articles

• Managing Mysteries and Plot Twists
• Running Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures
• Running Dungeon Crawls

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

This article is one in a series where we look at particular adventure types and identify how to prepare them, how to run them, what pitfalls we might run into, and how we can overcome these pitfalls.

This whole series of articles will include:

• Dungeon Crawls
• Infiltrations and Heists
• Investigations
• Missions
• Travel
• Defense
• Intrigue

This article is only one way to run infiltration-style adventures and even the categorization may go against your own views. That's totally fine. There are many right ways to enjoy this game.

Robin Laws's book Adventure Crucible — Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG heavily inspired my thoughts on this topic.

Understanding Infiltration Adventures

In infiltration adventures, the characters often have significant information about their goal, the location in which they must accomplish the goal, and knowledge of the inhabitants of the location. Heists are a common form of infiltration adventure but many infiltrations involve doing something other than stealing something.

Infiltration adventures differ from dungeon crawls because the characters often know more about the location they're infiltrating and spend more time planning their approach. Goals for infiltration adventures can vary, even if how we prepare and run them remains mostly the same. These goals include:

• Stealing something
• Kidnapping someone
• Rescuing someone
• Hunting down a bad guy
• Performing a magic ritual
• Disrupting a magic ritual
• Uncovering war plans
• Recovering blackmail evidence
• Uncovering evidence of a plot
• Planting evidence

Preparing Infiltration Adventures

Preparing infiltration adventures focuses on the following activities:

• Clarifying the goal and ensuring it's something important enough that the characters are willing to risk their lives for it.
• Choosing a map. Unlike dungeon crawls, there's a good chance we'll give a copy of this map to the players.
• Filling in the location with details. I like printing out a Dyson map and writing a couple of words per room or area right on the page.
• Listing out inhabitants and understanding their behaviors. What are they doing when the characters aren't there? Unlike dungeon crawls, inhabitants of a location in an infiltration adventure are often more mobile.
• Listing potential complications. What unknown events might shake things up? Make a list of a handful to either choose from or roll on during the infiltration.
• Ensuring there are multiple paths to achieve the goal. Do they sneak in an upper window? Pretend to be servants? Delve in through the sewers below?

With that material in hand, we're ready to run our infiltration adventure.

Running Infiltration Adventures

Infiltration adventures often break down into the following phases:

• Planning. Unlike other adventures, players spend a lot of time planning their infiltration.
• Choosing roles. What jobs are each of the characters taking on the infiltration? Is someone acting as the "face" character? Is someone the muscle? Is someone sneaking around and spying on things from a higher floor?
• Execution. This is where the real adventure begins. The characters start doing the things they planned.
• Flashbacks. A concept taken from Blades in the Dark gives players an opportunity to flash back earlier in the story to set something up or acquire something they need. Inspiration or luck may be a good mechanic to allow for adjustments or additions to the party's plan.
• Complications. Things never go according to plan. What changes? What complications do you throw in from your list of potential complications? Or do you roll it? Complications don't always have to go against the characters.
• The climax. What happens when the characters achieve their goal? What happens if they fail or partially succeed?
• The escape. How do the characters get out afterwards?

Infiltration Adventure Pitfalls

Infiltration adventures might go wrong for the following reasons:

• Players spend too long planning.
• The plans go out the window too early.
• The characters aggro the entire location, making the job impossible to complete.
• A single bad check affects too much of the outcome.
• Too many complications disrupt the whole plan.
• The changing situation makes it too hard to adjudicate.

Pitfall Mitigation

What can we do to help ensure these pitfalls don't crud up our fun session?

• Arbitrate conversations and get the players to a consensus so the game can move forward. Ensure the players you're not pushing them down one path or leading them to utter destruction.
• Keep a balance on consistency and chaos. Some things should go to plan, some things should go haywire. Don't disrupt or destroy the whole plan too early.
• Use Blades-style "clocks" to escalate tension based on failed checks rather than everything going bad all at once.
• Give leeway in choosing when adversaries become aware of the characters. It should take multiple failed attempts before the characters are discovered and it shouldn't chain out to every adversary in the whole location.

A Framework for Countless Adventures

The infiltration style adventure is a popular and flexible model we can use for many different adventures. Change the goal, the location, and the situation and you have something fresh every time yet still have a consistent framework around which to build your adventure.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on High Value Prep and The Marrow Fiend – Shadowdark Gloaming Session 23 Lazy GM Prep.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:

• Rascal.News for TTRPG News
• Ginny Di on D&D with ADHD
• Shadow of the Weird Wizard Released
• The Benefits of Character Factions
• The Many Right Answers of TTRPGs

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

• WOTC and Table-Usable Maps
• Selling Magic Items -- Info and Inventories
• Tying Backgrounds to Curse of Strahd
• How do I Feel about AI in TTRPGs?

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Write your own map key on a printed map.
• For dungeons, focus on one or two word descriptions for each chamber. Save longer descriptions for complicated set-piece chambers.
• Build your own binder with your favorite reference pages in it.
• Stuck for an idea? Write down ten and pick the best one.
• Need inspiration? Take a walk and let your mind wander.
• Find a suite of tools for your prep that you love and you'll be drawn to use it.
• Put dialog-friendly NPCs in the deepest dungeons – talking statues, paintings, magic items, or ghosts. Everyone wants a friend!

Related Articles

• Running Dungeon Crawls
• Running Defense Adventures
• Running Roleplay and Intrigue Adventures

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

A nasty cold knocked me on my ass so instead of a YouTube and Podcast recording of the Lazy RPG Talk Show, I'm going to deliver the same info to you in beloved HTML!

New Maps Features on D&D Beyond

Wizards of the Coast released a video of new D&D Beyond Maps features. They've updated a lot since the last time I played around with it – token naming and re-naming, a spectator view, a drawing tool, and a pointer. I spent some time on Twitch mucking around with the new features and I like it a lot. WOTC is definitely taking a lighter-weight Owlbear Rodeo approach which I appreciate. I'd love to see them let people upload custom tokens and add text-based notes to the map. It's far more functional now than it was a couple of months ago.

For those running WOTC adventures with WOTC character options, it's a great tool.

It's interesting that WOTC / Hasbro chose to hedge their bets by investing in both a lightweight 2d map-based VTT and a heavy-weight expensive 3d VTT. I'll bet the former is more popular than the latter.

Marilith Preview for the Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault

Kobold Press released a preview of the Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault Marilith and I think it looks awesome. It hits hard, has a simple stat block, and still has interesting crunchy features befitting this high-power demon. I'm eager to see the Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault. It's going to be wild to have four different core monster books by this time next year: the 2014 D&D Monster Manual, the 2024 D&D Monster Manual, the Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault, and the Level Up Advanced 5e Monstrous Menagerie. We have lots of core monsters to choose from and no limitation on which monsters we decide to use at our tables.

Bob World Builder on GM Regrets

Bob World Builder has an awesome YouTube Video on GM Regrets. I don't think it's useful to fixate on our regrets but we can learn a lot by listening to the regrets of others. I don't have many GM regrets. I'm happy with how things turned out in my TTRPG life. I do regret not playing OD&D in the early 80s with my oldest friend Scott – a friend I've had for almost half a century. I talked to him yesterday about it and we both had a laugh. We both barely remember the time anyways.

Dread Laironomicon

Raging Swan released the Dread Laironomicon, a tome standing side-by-side with the Dread Thingonomicon to fill in the details of one hundred lairs from the Cultists' Hidden Fane to a Roper's Cave. Each lair includes seven lists of ten details to fill in such lairs. This book is an excellent source of inspiration for filling in the details of a location during prep – making such places come alive. If you're a fan of the excellent works of Raging Swan Press, you will not be disappointed. My only complaint is a lack of higher-focus lists of chambers in such lairs but the major and minor features lists largely fill in that need. I received a review copy of the Dread Laironomicon for this spotlight.

Dune on Humble Bundle

Humble Bundle currently offers a 17 book digital package for Modiphius's Dune RPG for $18. Such bundles are a great way to dive into an RPG for a low cost. I don't intend to run it but after awaiting Dune part 2 and re-reading the original Dune books, it's great fun to delve into the artwork and read the lore behind the RPG. If you love Dune and want a taste of the RPG, this is a great deal.

Being Good Stewards of the Hobby

Based on an excellent conversation with Graham Ward on Mastering Dungeons, I was inspired to consider what we can do to be good stewards of the TTRPG hobby. I asked folks across several platforms and got many excellent responses which I'll put together into a longer article. For a quick preview, here are some things I think we can all do to be great stewards of the TTRPG hobby:

• Embrace the diversity of our hobby, both in the games we play and the people playing them.
• Learn from everyone, whether they are new to the hobby or a grizzled veteran.
• Welcome new players. Teach them how to play and learn from their experiences.
• Focus on the fun we can have at the table with our friends.
• Support peoples' love for their chosen systems, even if those systems aren't for you.
• Avoid gatekeeping with jargon, how one came to the hobby, the games one chooses to play, or how long one has played games.
• Share our love of the hobby openly.

Simple Online Combat Tracking with a Text Editor

I've been playing a mix of online and in-person games recently and return to the simple text editor as a great way to track combat when playing online. Using Notepad or whatever text editor you prefer you can track initiative, positioning in theater of the mind combat, damage done to creatures, and more.

Here's a quick example of the text I had for a battle I ran last night:

    23 Chartreuse
    12 Crimson Lotus 71 > Chartreuse 
    12 Blackguard Wight 10 > Voxi
    12 Blackguard Wight 49 > Helm
    7 Voxi
    7 Zaffre In the Back
    6 Helm 
    5 Radon
    3 Eldrox

The above has the characters and creatures in initiative order. The left-hand numbers are their initiative roll. The right-hand numbers are the damage done to the creature. The angle brackets indicate that a monster is adjacent to a particular character. You can type status effects, multiple adjacent characters, or any other notes next to a creature's name to keep track.

Using text editors for combat tracking is fast, easy, cheap, and independent of RPG system or digital tools. I love it.

Page 12 of the Lazy DM's Companion has more tricks for tracking theater of the mind combat in a text editor that differs from the above but both can give you ideas how to easily track combat in a text editor.

Patreon Questions

Every month, Patrons of Sly Flourish can ask any question in a special monthly Q&A. I answer every RPG-related question each Friday morning. Here are some highlights for this week. Please note these questions have been edited for length.

Announcing a Villain's Plans and Progress

From Jason. I was curious how you balance multiple story arcs throughout a campaign. The villain in our campaign, who is progressing his own plans, is coming to a point where some of those plans will come to fruition. I'm struggling with "announcing" those plans when the PC's are in the middle of another story arc. I'm worried that may seem railroad-like if I throw a hook out there that they will feel inclined to investigate and move off of what they are currently on. My goal with the villain's plans was to keep him going in the background, and thus in the PC's consciousness, instead of having everything happen at the very end.

Sometimes we get stuck between revealing interesting information and such information ending up as an adventure hook. It's important to clarify to the players that not all information is actionable. Such information isn't something they can or should feel pressure to do something about right now.

Secrets and clues can help characters learn about the escalation of villainous quests without immediately changing their current direction to chase them down. If characters choose to chase down such a situation, and have the opportunity to do so, perhaps that's the way the story should go. Otherwise, make it clear to players when they receive information about an escalating villainous quest that they can't necessarily do anything about it right now. Tell, don't show.

Published Adventures Don't Require Less Work

From William J. What do you think of the amount of work published adventures expect the DM to do? I'm normally a homebrew campaign kind of guy, but recently picked up a Wotc published adventure (shattered obelisk). The idea being that I was paying a professional writer to do most of the "prep" for me so with very little notice, I could almost just pick the book up and play. However I have been left rather disappointed. Am I being unrealistic with my "pay to prep less" expectation?

It's a misconception that published adventures require less work. That's certainly not the case and, sometimes, they take more work than a homebrewed adventure because you have to internalize a published adventure in a way a homebrew adventure is already internalized. Almost always, they require different kind of work – more of a focus on reading, absorption, and modification instead of thinking things up from scratch.

We shouldn't buy published adventures expecting them to be easier to run. Instead, we should buy them for the depth and quality of material we can't create ourselves. Stories, backgrounds, artwork, maps – these are components of good adventures we simply can't create at the same quality of a published adventure.

I think it actually works better to build homebrew adventures in published settings for the best of both worlds. A published setting gives you a great depth of lore and quality of materials along with the flexibility of building the adventure you want in that world.

Letting Non-Magic Users Use Relics

From Robert. Any house rules for letting non magic users use magic items/relics? If one of my non spell casting PCs picks up a relic, I’d like them to have a solid chance of it actually working (at least the same chance a magic user would have) and the existing rules for say, scrolls, don’t really cut it.

I don't expect a single-use magical relic to be limited to magic users. Relics should be identifiable and usable by anyone who picks them up. That's what makes them fun. Let players know what a relic does and let any character use them.

Adding CR to Published Adventures

From Ryan. I find for me one of the minor speed bumps that prevent me from improvising a monster is if I’m adapting a published module. If it says “4 skeletons”, I have to look up the skeleton stat block to see what the CR is to figure out what I’d replace it with or what the FoF baseline is that I’d swap in for an easier time stat line to run with just some flavour or a single monster power. I think for me the missing piece would be if an adventure said “4 skeletons (CR 1/4)”. Thoughts? Maybe when I first read an adventure I should just mark up all the CRs.

That's a great idea and something I'll consider for future adventures of my own. You can use the "monster stats by CR table" in Forge of Foes to benchmark any monster in any adventure against the "example 5e monsters". The intention of that column is to help you identify a monster's CR by comparing it to those examples. Is it less or more powerful than an elemental? What about a frost giant? Understanding what sorts of monsters have which CRs is a great way to use that table to build monsters you need as you use them.

Introducing Cursed Magic Items Without Removing Player Agency

From Garry. One of the players has just picked up a magic item which while useful, is cursed. If he attunes to it, it will slowly turn him evil and lure him towards the BBEG and his cult of monstrous followers. While this is good, the original text explicitly explains that the previous user (high level cleric) went mad and killed all his followers with everyone turning to wraiths. That player tends to dominate the direction play by force of personality from time to time, but he is usually very fair minded. I'm reluctant to have the whole curse thing in case he runs wild with it to the detriment of the game. Should I just change the properties of the item? Any advice?

Yeah, change the properties. My absolute favorite "cursed" magic items are intelligent items that continually make offers to the characters in exchange for information or power. The best cursed items are those the players know are cursed and still use them anyway.

You're right to be concerned about taking agency away from the player. Don't do it. Instead, let them know the sword is cursed and have it steer them with continual offers, dancing that dangerous line. It's great fun. A smart magic weapon knows how to manipulate its user and the whole thing is much more fun when everyone is in on it. Of course, "pause for a minute" to make sure everyone's still having a good time.

Introducing Rivals Who Aren't Instantly Killed

From R. Scott W. I want to introduce a rival team into the mix since my PCs are so competitive. How do I keep the party from killing off the rivals so that they can have a long term impact on the game?

Let the characters, and the players, know about these rivals without having them get within sword-swinging distance. If you put the rivals and the characters in the same room together, swords and spells may fly. Instead, what if the characters hear about and see the results of these rivals without getting close to them. Maybe they meet them in a bar sometime if you think it isn't going to end up in bloodshed. Eventually things might come to blows but even more fun is when those rivals end up becoming allies instead.

Another Great Week for TTRPGs!

Thank you for digging into this week's tabletop RPG news! Sorry I couldn't do it on a video but hopefully this newsletter gave you the taste you desire. See you next week and keep on rolling those 20s!

Related Articles

• The Case For Published Adventures
• 2016 D&D 5th Edition Dungeon Master Questionnaire
• Run Homebrew Adventures in a Published Setting

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

Read more »

This article is one in a series where we look at particular adventure types – how to prepare them, how to run them, what pitfalls we might run into, and how we might overcome these pitfalls.

The adventure types in this series include:

• Dungeon crawls
• Infiltration
• Investigation
• Missions
• Travel
• Defense
• Intrigue

This article focuses on one approach for running dungeon crawls and your own preferences may differ. That's totally fine. There are many right ways to prepare, run, and enjoy our games.

Robin Laws's book Adventure Crucible — Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG heavily inspired this article.

Understanding Dungeon Crawls

In dungeon crawls, characters travel room-by-room through a relatively unknown maze-like location to accomplish one or more goals. Such dungeons can include crypts, caves, caverns, castle ruins, derelict ships, ruined towers, planar nodes, old temples, and other room-and-hall-based locations.

Preparing Dungeon Crawls

Consider the following steps when preparing a dungeon crawl:

• Choose a map (I love dysonlogos maps.)
• Fill in location details – just a word or two per room. You can handwrite these notes right on a printed copy of the map.
• Write down potential traps and hazards.
• If using a published adventure, read over the rooms in the dungeon from the adventure.
• Write a clear goal to reinforce with your players. The goal should be important enough to offset the danger of going into the dungeon.
• Write out ten secrets and clues the characters might find in the dungeon. You don't have to set these clues in specific locations. Drop them in when it makes sense for the characters to learn them.
• List out potential monsters. Some monsters may be location specific but many might be wandering around.
• List out potential NPCs. They might reside in one room or wander around.
• List out treasure the characters might find. Feel free to place this treasure wherever it makes sense.

Running Dungeon Crawls

At the beginning, perhaps as part of a strong start, make sure to state or reinforce the goal. Why are the characters going into the dungeon? Why is it worth risking their lives?

When the characters are in the dungeon, set up how the dungeon crawl works by asking the following questions:

• Who's up front and who's in the back?
• What sort of lighting do the characters have?
• Who's keeping an eye out for monsters?
• Who's checking for traps, hazards, and secret doors? How are they checking?
• What paths do the characters want to take when they come to forks in the dungeon?

As the characters explore, dungeon inhabitants might move and react to the characters activities or the GM might roll for random encounters to shake things up.

Dungeon Crawl Pitfalls

The following common pitfalls can suck the fun out of a dungeon crawl. Be aware of them and account for them in your prep and play.

• Too many downward beats.
• A boring or overly complicated dungeon design.
• Too many hard battles.
• No clear goal or reason to go into the dungeon.
• No place to rest after expending all the characters' resources.
• Few opportunities to roleplay.
• No real choice or useful information when picking a path.
• The monsters always surprise the characters.

Offsetting Dungeon Crawl Pitfalls

Try the following ideas to offset potential pitfalls.

• Fill out exploration of a dungeon with secrets and clues.
• Include upward beats like finding secret passages or getting the drop on unsuspecting foes.
• Include safe places for a short or long rest.
• Select maps with engaging dungeon designs including loopbacks, secret passages, multiple paths, and asymmetric designs.
• Ensure there's useful information to inform the characters' choices.
• Include non-hostile NPCs with whom the characters can roleplay.
• Mix easy and challenging battles that make sense for the situation, not just those tuned for the characters' level.

The Most Common Adventure Type

Dungeon crawls are one of the most common adventure types, going back to the origins of D&D 50 years ago. With the tools above, we can use a common structure for preparation, gameplay, and avoiding pitfalls to run an awesome game for our friends.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Awarding Treasure in 5e and Roots of the Marrow Tree – Shadowdark Gloaming Session 22 Lazy GM Prep.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:

• D&D 2024 Core Book Release Dates
• Call the New Books "D&D 2024"
• D&D 2024 on Roll20
• Humblewood on D&D Beyond
• How D&D Began Video
• Best of Sly Flourish 2013-2023
• Different Steps for Different Circumstances

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

• Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands Campaign
• A Player's Version of Forge of Foes. Forge of Heroes?
• Favorite Three RPG Mechanics

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Give each monster type one cool unique defining ability.
• Draw quick maps to orient players during a dungeon crawl.
• Ask one player to act as the cartographer.
• Ask one player to manage initiative.
• Ask one or more players to be the official note taker. Ask them to share their notes with the group.
• Include a friendly NPC the characters can talk to.
• Run a mix of easy and challenging encounters.

Related Articles

• Dungeon Crawls Versus Situations
• Running a Dungeon Crawl
• Running Infiltration and Heist Adventures

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